The ongoing pandemic has definitely dragged our existence into the realm of virtual reality to a great extent indeed. A recent survey conducted by Vivo and CyberMedia Research (CMR) got attention in media across the country. This study on 2,000 respondents across top eight Indian cities covering the youth, housewives and working professionals aged between 15 and 45, with a male to female ratio of 70 to 30, in fact, portrayed alarming pictures as it depicted a massive rise in smartphone addiction in India.

It is apparent that the pandemic has tightened the grip of smartphones, and users complained of relationships being affected. No wonder. Where average times spent on a smartphone in a day was 4.5 hours in 2019, it has increased 39 per cent to seven hours in 2020. Certainly, a significant part of this increase in smartphone addiction is due to the urgency of connecting to the world around us during stay-at-home restrictions, and due to the revolution in the work-from-home culture including online teaching, etc.

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However, is ‘lonely togetherness’ getting exaggerated due to the pandemic? About four years ago, a 195-second music video ‘Are You Lost in the World Like Me?’, released by Moby and the Void Pacific Choir, globally became viral. The video, featuring animation from Steve Cutts, a London-based artist, is about our increasing dependence on technology and about human interaction today, or a certain lack of it. It shows users mindlessly staring into phones as they fall into manholes, a woman senselessly ‘liking’ posts on her device, an opportunistic selfie-taker posing as a fire burns in a building behind her, and users getting ‘lost’ in their mobile phones, all tying into the lyrical theme of the song posing a question: ‘Are you free?’ And the narrative is illustrated through one frantic character, who is seen trying to make sense of the world around him. His struggle to find human connection is in vain. Finally, we see people obsessively glued to their smartphones as they walk en masse off a cliff.

The video gave an impression that our smartphone apocalypse had reached its zenith at that time. The Vivo-CMR survey suggests that it did not; that there is room for more addiction. ‘Online’ surveys are usually far from being representative of the actual scenario, as samples are not ‘random’ in such surveys. Also, this Vivo-CMR survey covers an urban population of a particular agegroup and has a skewed malefemale ratio. Thus, the results could be biased. However, the broader picture – that of increasing smartphone addition and substantial increase in use during the pandemic – should reflect reality. The important question, however, is whether this smartphone addiction will decrease when normalcy is restored? Or, will it remain a part of our New Normal?

Some three years before the above-mentioned video, in 2013, in her viral short film entitled ‘I Forgot My Phone’, director Charlene deGuzman depicted society’s obsession with using smartphones through scenes such as hiking in the picturesque mountains, celebrating a birthday, lying in bed with a man, a man getting down on one knee and proposing to his girlfriend, a young girl on a playground swing – all interrupted by someone’s incessant smartphone ring. So, the smartphone has taken control of our lifestyles and lives for quite some time now. And the grasp is becoming tighter.

We now have new terms like Smartphone-zombie or ‘Smombie’ in popular culture to describe pedestrians who walk slowly and without attention to their surroundings because they are focused on their smartphones. During the last 7-8 years, there have been attempts to make separately designated ‘mobile lane’ (or ‘phone lane’ or ‘text walking lane’) for cell phone users in different cities of the world. The numbers of the ‘head-down tribe’, the term used to indicate people glued to mobile phones, is ever increasing.

A part of the increase in smartphone use in 2020, however, was certainly due to a compulsion – to accommodate a new lifestyle during the pandemic. And this was not possibly undesirable for society as well. While it is claimed that excessive use of smartphones “is impacting human relationships and behaviour”, isn’t that a by-product of increasing dependence of technology in our daily lives?

Actually, one might wonder whether the smartphone is the reason or just a medium for affecting relationships in changing society. In the 1950s, a celebrated American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury predicted such a future, possibly in four or five decades, in his stories such as ‘The Pedestrian’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’. However, in a 1953 article in ‘The Nation’, entitled ‘The Day After Tomorrow: Why Science Fiction?’, Bradbury wrote his personal experience in Beverly Hills one night when he saw a husband and wife walking their dog. “The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleepwalking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there.”

Much later, in her 2011 book ‘Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other’, MIT professor Sherry Turkle argued that the relentless connection to technology and the digital world leads us to a deep solitude, and as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. In any case, ‘lonely togetherness’ is getting intensified in society – there’s little doubt about that. The pandemic certainly is just a very good excuse.

The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata