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Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
London - It is one of modern life’s great irritants, other people engrossed in their smartphones and oblivious to all around them.
And now one of the chief architects of the digital revolution has admitted there is something fundamentally wrong about a form of communication which relies on people cutting themselves off from the world.
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google – which provides the Android operating software for many phones – told a technology conference in California that burying your head in a smartphone was anti-social.
“Is this the way you’re meant to interact with other people?” he said. “It’s kind of emasculating.”
While the ubiquitous smartphone has allowed access to information wherever we are, our reliance on them has had unfortunate social consequences, said Mr Brin.
The billionaire entrepreneur also compared people’s addiction to their phones with smoking.
“The cellphone is a nervous habit – if I smoked, I’d probably smoke instead, it’d look cooler,” he said.
“But I whip this out and look as if I have something important to do. It really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent secluding myself away in email.”
Advertising expert Renny Gleeson said obsessive smartphone use was rude. “Let’s make technologies that make people more human and not less,” he told the conference. - Daily Mail
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