Olaf Tempelman January 1, 2024, 15:52
Best wishes, strength if you have just stopped smoking, and strength if you are going to spend the first month of the year alcohol-free as part of the IkPas campaign, better known in our beautiful language area as Dry January. I also wish people who consciously put away their smartphones this month all the strength they deserve, but I don’t know if they even exist. I was going to argue for making January a digital detox month under the name J-analogue January – until I realized that we already know for sure that people worldwide will spend more hours on their phones in 2024 than in 2023.
Every now and then you have someone who feels like doing a strange withdrawal experiment. During the month called Stoptober in anti-smoking campaigns, a colleague decided to take a break from using his smartphone. The gist of his story about it in this newspaper reminded me of a book by a boy who had gone offline for a whole year: nice to ride on a horse-drawn cart, but difficult because you can’t get on the highway with such a cart. can.
Sometimes I feel almost privileged that I can still leave that damn smartphone lying around everywhere and never miss it. It gives me more social stands every year, in the form of Very Short emails from colleagues (‘CAN YOU PLEASE ANSWER YOUR PHONE!?’) and Very Angry texts from my teenage daughter (‘How many messages do I have to send before you time to check your phone?’). On one of those rainy Saturdays with which the year 2023 was generous, my daughter wanted to be picked up somewhere twenty minutes earlier than agreed. In those twenty minutes that she had to wait because I neglected to check my phone, the number of texts rose to twenty. You may call it quixotic, but I will continue to advocate the right to be without a smartphone for a whole day in 2024.
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2024-01-01 14:52:45
#people #worldwide #spend #hours #phones
