Smartphones have led to the ’death of proximity’

A UCL study across nine countries shows smartphones are more than devices we use, they're 'the place where we live' and swap for close contact with others. The most in depth study ever to look at how adults use smartphones reveals how we are 'homeless' when we lose them because they are where we increasingly express our personalities, interests and values. We adapt them to our needs and have swapped face to face time with family, friends and colleagues for hours spent 'at home' on our smartphones. A team of 11 anthropologists spent 16 months documenting smartphone use in nine countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, with a particular focus on older adults. Their analysis is published in The Global Smartphone: Beyond a youth technology, a new book by an international team of researchers led by Professor Daniel Miller (UCL Anthropology) whose previous project on social media, Why We Post, saw more than a million downloads of the open access books that detailed the findings. Describing smartphones as devices that facilitate 'perpetual opportunism', this new research shows how the creativity of users to mould their phones to meet their needs has far greater impact on their experience than the way the device adapts to them, through the algorithms or artificial intelligence that supposedly makes them "smart". This observation is defined as 'smart from below'.