A Darwinian explanation for Cellphone addiction !
I write this more as a speculation than a fact and I don’t know how accurate it really is - but going by first principles - it kind of makes sense.
Technology may have changed the world unrecognizably in just one generation but human biology is still the same as the last few thousand years at least. The modern era of the last 500 years of Industrial revolution and, especially the last few decades of the Information revolution - is but a fraction of a second compared to the hundreds of millions of years that we spent in the bushes and the jungles as primates. During all that endless time, the human brain evolved to take maximum cognizance of highly localized events directly affecting our chances of successfully surviving and reproducing.
The Agricultural and Industrial revolutions changed that to some extent but at a pace still slow enough for the brain to somehow adapt to information input from a somewhat wider geography. The Information age however accelerated the pace drastically and the current phase of exponential growth in digitization has led to us getting practically data bombed with news from the remotest corners of the planet ! Wanna see the pizza your friend is eating a thousand miles away - Facebook shows you. Wanna know how many African elephants are engaged in mating as of now ?! Strategically placed heat and motion sensors are probably feeding live updates on this from the jungles to various websites that Google channelizes to present you with that exact information in seconds !
The human brain never evolved for such a never ending stream of data input that we keep getting bombarded with through the screens that have become so ubiquitous all around. More and more people are suffering from a data overload that their brains simply can't cope with.
For evolutionary reasons, the human brain evolved to maximize the data intake from the surroundings which directly increased chances of surviving and reproducing. The senses were ever alert to the rustle of a tiger in the bushes or the presence of a potential mate in the offing - the quicker this information was processed by the brain, better the chances of escaping the tiger or courting a mate.
By default, the brain does not say NO to data input. Going by this reasoning, it is not at all surprising that people find themselves compulsively scrolling through the endless chatter on social media and internet. More the data - better the chances of succeeding - that’s how the brain is wired.
Ironically, the very purpose of this data processing fails when the input is not relevant to the original intended purpose of preserving well being. Human brain has naturally evolved to automatically accept and process data but, such data was always limited to input from the immediate surroundings - which was indeed very pertinent. In this digital age however, the brain is lured into processing a barrage of information that is useless towards ensuring any kind of success. A friend-of-friend on Facebook ( who you will probably never meet ) having a glass of exotic wine in a fancy restaurant in a far away continent is information that is completely useless towards ensuring or propagating your well being. The brain however does not rationalize this fact and instantly starts to process the meaningless data by getting fooled into thinking that all data is relevant — as indeed it was in the jungles thousands and millions of years back. In short, our biological evolution is lagging far far behind our technological progress.
As a result, a lot of time and effort that can be spent going out to find opportunities in the real world is being spent slipping our fingers on touchscreens. A few very smart people are indeed avoiding this trap and leveraging the instant reach and connectivity facilitated by today’s digital ubiquity — without getting getting sucked into the digital wormhole. The majority however are falling prey to it.
There's a new kind of highly accelerated Evolution underway now - the people who will succeed hereon are the ones who can adapt to sift through this endless deluge of data to find those few nuggets of useful information - and then use that information to translate it into success in real life.
