Phone-free zones: we can’t put our phones down, so technology can do it for us

Our need to constantly stare at these blasted screens has changed the way we communicate, and it infiltrated everything from classrooms to concert halls - a distraction we can all do without.

Last week, Bob Dylan announced live gigs at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, and declared they were to be mandatory phone-free events. It was interesting to hear the immediate yelps of protest as folk vowed there was no way they’d hand over their phones, but that isn’t how it works thanks to a fella called Graham Dugoni who ought to be lauded by everyone from parents to promoters.

Over the past decade, his company, Yondr, has quietly delivered a new way of removing smart phones from our hands without the need for surgery to loosen our fingers, or, in some cases, straight forward amputation.

You put your phone into a pouch which automatically closes while in the designated area. You keep your phone with you but it is utterly unusable, until you step out of the phone-free zone and tap into one of the docking stations. A bit like taking the security tops off bottles of alcohol in Asda…

I’m all for it. The need to be in constant contact 24/7, is bewildering. It means we never fully switch off, and our brains need that down time. It’s left us all with the attention span of a goldfish.

The defence that we need to be available at all times in case the kids are taken ill or the house burns down is just nonsense. I was born in ‘64, my brother in ‘66 - when our parents went out they needed to find a phone box to call home. We survived, along with all the weans born before the advent of smart phones.

But, in 2024, we simply lack the basic willpower to not pick up our phones, and what’s the first thing we do? Check every social media app we’re on to see if anyone has messaged and who has updated their timelines; posts, memes, and pics, we can barely recall minutes later.

The fact it has taken someone to forcibly separate us from the devices we constantly check is long overdue. It needs rolled out to every classroom and college lecture room, and if gigs and major gatherings become phone-free zones then I can live without taking half a dozen snaps.

I won’t miss the pavlovian sight of arms rising about heads, and hundreds of wee screens reflecting the image on the screen, each of them with that irritating wee red button indicating their all filming - footage we then scroll through with barely minimal interest. I’ve seen fans stream chunks of gigs to their mates back home, but their footage is pointless as most of it consists of them screaming, singing the chorus (badly) and jumping up and down. Streaming has meant that we can watch live footage of any major gig anywhere in the world, for free. Maybe I’m just old, but sometimes you just gotta be in the room.

Dugoni summed it up perfectly: “When phones are out, it bleeds the energy out of a room.”

That applies to classrooms as much as concert halls. Lock our phones away. The world will keep on spinning.