The Department of Head Posture at the University of Taunton has conducted an exhaustive study on the effects to the body of people constantly looking down at their mobile phones and tablets and adding to their Facebook pages. 72 % of all those between the ages of 16 and 38 walk through the street gazing raptly at their phones, and some 53% regularly have their heads down while out to dinner with spouses and boyfriends, accompanied by mutual grunts.
“Constantly looking down is very bad for the posture and the back”, says professor Jane Furness, an expert in walking and standing upright. “The outlook is not good for the human race. There are two distinct possibilities, either of which could start occurring within two generations:
- Humans will bend lower and lower until they resume the posture of the great ape, which moves around with two hands on the ground.
- Human beings will develop eyes in the top of their heads so that they can see where they are going, because now they can’t”.
“These adaptations”, says Prof. Furness, “are fully in accordance with the work of Darwin. Humans adapt to their environment, and some adapt quicker than others. However, as Darwin points out, if individuals do not inherit these adaptive traits, they will not survive to reproduce themselves. Constant trauma to the brain caused by repeated collisions with stone walls, (or to phoneless people like the writer of this post), is not compatible with with a long and healthy life.”
As a young person in Britain, I think I may be somewhat qualified to talk on this subject. I agree that constantly looking at your phone can be very anti social, but I think this study is very short-sighted, because it doesn’t take into account the possibility of future technological advancements that make the need to bend down obsolete. For instance, many old people worried that due to teenagers typing shortened versions of words on their phones, the English language would slowly decay. But such a fear has now been dismissed, as larger touchscreen phones have QWERTY keyboards, lessening the time saved by typing shortened versions of words. Me and my friends always type in full.
Coming back to bending down, if Google Glasses become mainstream, we will no longer need to bend down to use our phones, as they will be on our glasses. More generally, it has long been feared that technology will harm us in some way, but such fears have yet to materialise.