Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

People Willing to Go Without Sex, Shoes and Caffeine Rather Than Give Up Their Cellphones

We all know we are a society addicted to our cellphones.

But a recent study from TeleNav indicates just how far we would go rather than part with our beloved wireless technology.

The study found that:

  • A third of all surveyed were willing to give up sex for a week rather than forego their mobile phone. (A full 70 percent of those willing to give up their phones were women.)
  • When it comes to guilty pleasures, 55 percent were willing to go without caffeine, 63 percent said they’d give up chocolate before their phone, and 70 percent would forsake alcohol to hang on to their phone.
  • Some 54 percent were willing to go a week without exercise to keep a tight grip on their phone. (I wonder how many people were already going a week without exercise — I’m surprised that number isn’t higher than 54 percent.)

Perhaps there are limits as to how far people would go: Only one in five was willing to go shoeless rather than phoneless. But of those, 43 percent of iPhone owners were willing to go barefoot, as compared with 27 percent of Android users and a quarter of BlackBerry owners.

Some 22 percent of smartphone owners said they would rather go a week without seeing their significant other than without checking their apps. (That’s probably the same number of people found sleeping on the couch after taking said survey.)

Only 14 percent of feature phone owners felt similarly. I have to say, if you are more willing to go without seeing your loved one than give up your nonsmartphone, you might want to rethink both your relationship and your choice of technology.

(Letterpress image courtesy of Elizabeth Weil)

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik