The machine that seemed like a miraculous servant, has become our master. It’s likely too you find the compulsiveness with which you check your phone a little discomforting. It’s probable you won’t even finish this article (a 12-minute read) without checking your phone at least once. “I really have to make an effort to put on blinders when I log on to do social media marketing.”Īnyone who owns a smartphone knows the feeling of what it’s like to fall down a rabbit hole, or to be with someone but not really be with them as they flick through screens. “It’s virtually impossible right now (to bring it under control),” said Becky Bettencourt of Blue River Diamonds in Peabody MA, speaking just before the election. “Please let me know how since I have never gone on Facebook and got off in less than two hours,” lamented Alexander Rysman, owner of Romm Diamonds in Brockton, MA. But it’s also undeniable that we could all use the technology better. Much of this is overblown and is clearly hyperbole (it’s no small irony that in the information age, everything must pretty well be the worst crisis ever just to get our attention). She fears an “attention-deficit future” in which we’ll live shallow, joyless lives, robbed of our powers of “deep focus”. We face a “coming dark age”, cautions Maggie Jackson in Distracted. We read that teenagers are on the “brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades”. We’re told that our brains are being hijacked and remolded. Hardly a month goes by, it seems, without one new book and several magazine articles informing us that life these days moves too fast, bombarding us with too much information. The Internet, and social media in particular, has been blamed for stoking our baser instincts – the constant overwhelming access makes us feel jealous or inadequate, exhausts us, fuels rage, robs us of time we could spend with our loved ones or on important tasks, and given rise to concerns about social dysfunction. The initial promise of an always-on, interconnected world was that it would be professionally enabling, personally enriching and socially democratizing as it brought a world of ideas and useful data (not to mention peer-reviewed products) to wherever you were. Apart from the occasional long-haul flight, camping trip, or natural disaster that brings down thed grid, we are online and connected 24/7, catching up on news, customer issues, our stock portfolio, the current location of the burrito we ordered and the latest zinger from our favorite political pundit. Of course, there’s not much about this experience that is unique to jewelers. In between, they spend something like 5 hours absorbed in its glow. Their smartphone is often the first thing they see when they wake up and it’s usually the last thing they glance at before falling asleep. According to a recent INSTORE Brain Squad survey, a typical store owner will pick up their phone more than 200 times day. America’s jewelers spend a lot of time on their phones.
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