Summary Of Nicholas Carr's How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds?

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds” (November 10, 2017) Carr discusses the implications of allowing our smartphones to have such a huge effect on our lives. Smartphones serve many purposes, and have created massive societal effects throughout the world despite being introduced roughly only two decades ago. One can converse with anyone in the world at any given moment, they can watch any television show they want, and they can receive alerts so they no longer have to put effort into remembering things themselves. However, with so much control over people’s own lives, one begins to wonder about the negative consequences of the smartphones themselves. Carr brings up the question of how our minds can be negatively affected by this when he asks, “So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our own perception and cognition?” While Carr is aware that the smartphone serves a countless number of useful purposes and tasks, he believes we should think deeper about the lesser known effects of our smartphones which people so easily allow to take over their lives.
Carr begins his article with statistics, stating that the typical smartphone owner checks on their phone over 80 times a day, which translates to almost 30,000 times a year. He calls smartphones our constant companions, comparing them to teachers, secretaries, confessors, and gurus. In fact, Carr includes a 2015 Gallup survey which found that “more than half of iPhone