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The Curse Of The SmartPhone

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Date and time
Tuesday, February 8, 2022

In today’s globalized world which operates 24/7, it is hard to imagine life without the ubiquitous smartphone. But it wasn’t always so. The first iPhone was introduced in 2007, so even though there are 6 billion cell phone users today, millions of people were raised without cellphones or indeed any phone at all! This possibility is, of course, inconceivable to a Generation Z-er. There are undeniable benefits to owning a smart phone – navigating, contacting loved ones, organizing business, taking photos and recording music. A myriad of convenient functions all contained within one small digital rectangle! The smartphone did change the 20th Century, but it came at a cost. It brought with it, unique and perhaps unintended consequences into every sphere of our lives. Paul Greenberg quit his iPhone three years ago to research Goodbye Phone, Hello World after he realized that he had wasted one whole year of his life on the phone that could have been spent with his teenage son. Greenberg will talk about what he learned. Do you love or hate your phone? Could you live without it?

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Paul Greenberg is the author of the James Beard Award-winning New York Times bestseller Four Fish and a regular contributor to The New York Times. He has also written for National Geographic Magazine, GQ, The Times (of London), Vogue, and lectures on seafood and the environment around the world. He is currently a fellow with The Safina Center and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. His most recent book, American Catch, is published by the Penguin Press and explores how the United States, a country that controls more ocean than any other on earth, came to be a seafood debtor nation, importing more than 90% of its seafood from abroad.