Smartphones are making us dumber

Taiwanese children experiment with smartphones

The long-term physical and psychological consequences of this mass addiction to tablets and smartphones cannot bode well for humanity 

From the way people behave on the MRT, on buses, at coffee shops, restaurants, in parks, or on sidewalks, one would think that Taiwan had been hit by a zombie infestation well before the release of summer zombie blockbuster World War Z. Everywhere one turns, they are there, walking about in a daze, sitting comatose, completely oblivious to their surroundings and absorbed in their smartphones, their insect-like fingers tapping and sliding furiously. 

Hailed just a few years ago as a great technological advance, the smartphone has since turned into an instrument that has made the general population more dumb, less attentive, asocial and disconnected from reality. 

My unsigned editoral, published today in the Taipei Times, continues here.