Our love affair with smartphones has grown so deep, we now practically live inside them: A new study by anthropologists from University College London (UCL) into smartphone use and impact focusing on older adults in nine countries found that more people now feel the same way about their devices as one conventionally does about their home, the Guardian reports. The excessive use of smartphones, and the sense of familiarity engendered by easily chatting with your loved ones or checking your favourite social media feeds has more or less turned us into “human snails carrying our homes in our pockets,” write the study’s coauthors. The research proposes that smartphones can “challenge the house itself (and possibly also the workplace) in terms of the amount of time we dwell in it while awake.”

The study calls it the “transportal home”: The smartphone now acts as a sort of portal that can instantly transport us inwards, where we can engage in familiar and comforting activities. The fact that this pattern of relationship between person and smartphone is so ubiquitous has been attributed in part to the fact that “the world has grown more restless, with movement resulting from migration, work patterns, better transport, and multiple other factors” becoming commonplace. The idea of home as a single location now seems outdated, with most people using their smartphone as the device with which to connect with distantly located people who make up their emotional sense of home.

But this “always on, always on you” connectivity is eroding our ability to have deeper, more spontaneous conversations with others: Though smartphones once held the promise of better connectivity, our devices are making us way less attentive to the people closest to us. Individuals in the same room are worlds apart while using their smartphones. This flagrant rupture of conventional etiquette has been altering the very divide between what’s public and private — a phenomenon that’s causing what researchers call the "death of proximity," of face-to-face interaction, among all age groups.

Is this because we’re increasingly phubbing? Let's face it — chances are you have been phubbed (phone-snubbed) or were a phubber at least once in your life. Phubbing — an act that has proven to help turn you into a social pariah — manifests itself in abruptly pulling out your cell phone at the dinner table or in the middle of a conversation, bringing about the frustration and offence termed the “death of proximity” by the study. “We’re learning to live with the jeopardy that even when we’re physically together, we can be socially, emotionally or professionally alone,” Daniel Miller, who led the study, tells the Guardian.

Chat apps have been leading the shift: The rules of social interaction have been redrawn in the age of chat apps such as WhatsApp, Line and WeChat, according to the study which describes these mobile messaging services as the “heart of the smartphone.” Such tools have made it much easier to stay in touch over long distances, while being easy to use.

The spike in the use of online messaging was partially due to covid, as populations under lockdown across different parts of the world tried to stay connected. April 2020 survey data from UK-based consulting firm Kantar found that Facebook-owned WhatsApp saw the instant messaging market’s greatest gains in usage — an estimated 40% increase — since the pandemic began.

Remember, smartphones may be a breeding ground for some real life conflict: These little glass and metal devices can arguably instigate a number of work and social problems as smartphones further encroach upon our personal lives. Business communication platforms, including Slack, Microsoft Teams and Flock, along with the various social media apps that have been hitting global markets at a rapid pace, are likely to “reduce the prior experience of home as a refuge. Employees may now be expected to remain in contact with their work, for instance, even after leaving the workplace,” UCL’s study shows. And smartphones are not to blame, says Miller, there are both good and bad aspects of having that technology in our lives. However, the most critical aspect is how we, as humans, choose to use them.