While my friends swapped funny videos on their smartphones, I enjoyed my freedom. Then society made that impossible<\/p>\n
My gran has a new smartphone, and I am trying to help her navigate it. But she doesn\u2019t see the point. She says her smartphone<\/a> is \u201cmalevolent, sneaky and sly\u201d because things on the screen disappear and cannot be retrieved. Her old \u201cdumbphone\u201d is more reliable. \u201cI love it,\u201d she says. \u201cIt never lets me down.\u201d I ask how she travels without maps. \u201cI work it out before I go.\u201d What about tickets for trains or events? \u201cYour mum\u2019s always sorted tickets.\u201d Even though I\u2019m a tech-savvy, gen Z 24-year-old, I understand her arguments perfectly. I also made a choice to go without a smartphone for a whole decade, from 2010 to 2020. In 2020, my final year of university, I caved and bought one, a choice encouraged by my mum, who was anxious for me to be more contactable.<\/p>\n Back in 2010, when I was 11, the small number of kids in my year who had smartphones were treated like celebrities. We would crowd round, heads bent over a video game or YouTube, snatching the phone off each other to have a go. But then, over the next couple of years, smartphones became the norm, and suddenly everyone was posting pictures and sending messages or even nude shots from their own.<\/p>\n Isabel Brooks is a writer living in south-east London<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While my friends swapped funny videos on their smartphones, I enjoyed my freedom. Then society made that impossible My gran has a new smartphone, and I am trying to help her navigate it. But she doesn\u2019t see the point. She says her smartphone is \u201cmalevolent, sneaky and sly\u201d because things on the screen disappear and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}