Why are students using smart phones so much?
There’s a simple reason behind smart phone use: wikipedia. Suppose you are sitting in a classroom or a lecture hall. Since teachers in most classrooms are almost always boring you with trivial stuff you already know, you talk to your friend about the use of the Hardy-Littlewood circle method in the recent proof of the ternary Golbach conjecture. Suppose he doesn’t really know how the Hardy-Littlewood circle method works (it’s effectively controlling a generating function on the unit circle in order to use the Cauchy integral to evaluate the coefficients but a bit more complex). One quick google search or wikipedia browse would clear that up pretty quickly.
[Insert smartphone use here] I’ll bet most of the people are looking on wikipedia or something to advance conversation rather than let it stagnate. Other pictures demonstrate people using smartphones to take pictures of food and post it on social networking sites. I admit cluelessness as to why people would use a smartphone in this manner. I suppose it serves to bookmark a time and place and also make friends jealous?
Perhaps they use the smartphone so much because THEY are boring. Interesting people tend to meld with their environment.