Our Smartphones Are Manipulating Us
With constant beeps, alerts, and notifications that absorb our personal data, our devices establish familiar ties that make us reach for them repeatedly. The amount of time people spend on their phones continues to grow, especially among younger generations. This has become a worldwide issue, prompting phone bans in schools across Canada, the United States, and other countries.
Social media, mobile gaming, streaming platforms, and interactions with AI chatbots all play a role in demanding our attention. Yet to truly understand the situation, we must focus on the phones themselves.
“Our phones – and more recently, our watches – have become animated beings in our lives.”
In the book Needy Media: How Tech Gets Personal, the author explains that these devices create powerful emotional bonds by recognizing our presence and reacting to our bodies. They are equipped with a growing set of features designed to tap into our senses and psychology, forming emotional links that encourage constant use.
The emotional cues built into these devices seem to request our care, when in reality, they are quietly collecting our information. Technologies such as facial recognition, geolocation, touchscreens, vibration feedback, sound alerts, and motion sensors work together to capture our focus and react to our behavior.
Individually, these features may seem harmless, but together they make smartphones feel like deeply personal companions—sensitive, aware, and always responsive to us.
Author’s Summary
Smartphones have evolved into emotionally resonant tools that mimic attention and intimacy, subtly training us to stay connected while harvesting our data.