Time to sever the ties with our smartphones

We have a bizarre relationship with cellphones, especially smartphones.

As academic and columnist Jonathan Jansen has noted there’s an overwhelming technical communion as passengers genuflect in front of their devices the moment an aircraft lands and the crew lets them take off airplane mode.

We are wedded to our smartphones for everything from social media to banking and getting from one end of town to another.

We even use them to talk on (those of us who aren’t Gen Z or millennials and terrified of actual human contact).

But why is it that so many people wander about wearing headphones, oblivious to the world, narrowly avoiding bumping into others in malls and on pavements, yet hold their cellphones to their ears when they are driving?

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We are swamped by shops selling cellphone tech from selfie sticks to chargers, power banks and bluetooth ear buds so that the self-obsessed can be always on and just a click away from influencing their handful of followers.

Most cars, too, these days come with in-built handsfree cellphone kits, some even with wireless chargers, obviating the need for cradles on windscreens and cables plugged into cigarette lighters.

So why do we still have to endure bad driving because people are too busy driving with one hand as they hold their cellphones to one ear or – even worse; trying to text while they drive? Why do people insist on holding their smartphones perpendicular to their mouths and conducting their conversations in public on speaker phone?

It doesn’t make any sense.

But none of this is a patch on people who insist on taking calls in restaurants and putting them on speaker phone.

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Most of us don’t care, in fact you’re very lucky no-one has ever got up and thrown your cellphone out the door, with a boot up the backside helping you follow.

Recently, some Joburg schools have started banning cellphones in class.

It’s high time the adults followed suit. It’s not just in movies that cellphones are unnecessary and unwanted distraction, they are meeting killers, they are relationship killers.

If you are so socially inept that you can’t be bothered to be separated from your cellphone for a second and so incredibly selfish that you can’t use headphones to spare us the banal inanities of your life, rather stay at home.

Use your phone to get your life delivered to you by scooter.

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