Your smartphone is filthier than your toilet seat. It’s crawling with bacteria, and you’re likely so addicted to the machine you rub it up against your face several times a day.
Baylor University marketing professor Dr. James Roberts has been watching the march of smartphones in society and says we’ve reached threatening proportions. “We’re actually looking for the same signs when we treat smartphone addiction that we do when we treat drug and alcohol addiction,” Roberts tells KTRH News. The statistics on the dangers this addiction is fueling are growing: in 2014, the last year for which statistics are available, 25% of car crashes involved a smartphone. The National Safety Council reports cell phone usage while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes a year. Almost 330,000 injuries are caused by texting while driving. Most adults say they have accidentally walked in to someone while looking at their smartphone. We’re crippled by anxiety at the prospect of losing our phone. 30% of men spend a minimum of four hours each day looking at their phones, but it gets worse. “Women tend to be more attached to their smartphones than men. We don’t know what we’d do without them. We can’t live without them and that’s the first sign of an addiction,” cautions Roberts. Phones have brought a level of connectivity to our lives that could not even be envisioned 20 years ago; today, regardless of age, we can’t conceive of that world anymore, and never will again.smart phone