It has been a long commute, and you have been staring at your smartphone for most of it.
An hour of your day spent looking at your phone, scrolling away. And another hour on the journey home. Just like yesterday. And the day before.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
It is a good thing, then, that you don’t live in the Japanese town of Toyoake in central Japan, which has introduced a local regulation that limits smartphone use to two hours a day for its 69,000 residents in a bid to tackle what it regards as excessive smartphone usage. For many, it would be the ultimate horror scenario. Not so much A Nightmare on Elm Street, but A Nightmare on Your Phone.
No penalties involved – yet
Fortunately, before you break into a cold sweat and look anxiously around you on the train, the measure, which was passed by the town’s assembly, probably rightly does not carry penalties for those who ignore it. It’s a gentle warning, aimed at encouraging self-regulation.
However, in the future, other towns—or even cities—may one day become more stringent, even authoritarian. Imagine your usage being monitored centrally and a clock in the corner of your screen ticking down. You could recharge your phone. But that would be pointless. You’re not out of juice; you’re out of allocation, maybe just like all the rest of the passengers in your train compartment, currently also gawping at their phones.
A battle to reduce scrolling
The Japanese town’s smartphone edict is well-meaning. Excessive smartphone usage has become a worldwide phenomenon, and that is why authorities are taking action, concerned over the psychological toll of phone addiction, especially on children and young people.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataFor avid Japanese scrollers, the battle to reduce their scrolling habits generated much interest. An article on The Guardian website in the UK discussed efforts to slim down from a chunky eight hours a day smartphone binge to a more smartphone-svelte two hours. Imagine the equivalent of a body mass index (BMI) for your smartphone usage!
The dietary regime may be painful for some. One user complained that he needed his phone to navigate his way through the “information wars”. That’s an interesting idea: your smartphone has become a weapon with which to defend yourself in that information conflict. Electronic chainmail, perhaps? Several young people accepted a challenge from The Guardian to try to keep their smartphone use down to that meager two-hour electronic diet.
A bigger problem: electronic rail tickets
The mental picture of an army of phone-scrollers in the carriage on their morning commute will be a familiar, though passive, one. Those people don’t use their phones in a way that has any impact on or interaction with others. But wait until they have got off the train and are heading smartphone in hand to the station’s passenger gates.
There, these information warriors will tie themselves in knots, creating hitherto unknown bodily contortions, trying to find the right angle-of-dangle to scan their barcode or QR code at the gate’s scanner. Time drags endlessly as one after another’s ham-fisted efforts waste others’ valuable time standing, frustrated, in the growing queue behind.
The solution, yet to be adopted by stations, is surely to put all the smartphone danglers in the same one queue, so they can all delay each other, while the rest of us with paper or smart card tickets, comparatively speaking, sail through. If you have ever been stuck in a queue behind inept smartphone danglers, you’ll know what I mean. It surely won’t be too long before the time wasted at train gates queuing behind the electronically ticketed naïve turns up in government inefficiency statistics, with questions asked in Parliament. (We can but hope!)
That is not to say electronic tickets on phones shouldn’t work effectively, but we may just need a mandatory mobile phone rail ticket ‘driving-test’ to solve the problem. Meanwhile, the focus on excessive scrolling time, highlighted in Japan, serves as a lightweight, but probably necessary warning, that you can have too much of a smartphone thing.
