Phones are only as smart as the people who use them

If you want to know how smartphones have made people less and less smart, just look around when you travel on the MTR. You will see passengers' faces set in fierce concentration as they work on an urgent task: swiping at their phones and tablets to place colourful candy icons in rows.

They are playing Candy Crush Saga, an insanely mindless game that has been downloaded more than half a billion times by smartphone users all over the world. It can be played for free, but many people find the game so much fun and the urge to master it so irresistible that they are willing to pay for extra lives and various performance-boosting tools. Thanks to these people, the game's maker, an Irish company that goes by the name of King Digital Entertainment, made close to two US$2 billion in sales last year, US$567 million of which was pure profit. The company is now valued at US$5 billion.

The dumbing down of culture and intellect is, of course, nothing new; it accelerated after the rise of commercial television and tabloid journalism. Yet there is no denying that mobile technology has set a new standard for preventing people from exercising their minds and coaxing them into addictive, self-indulgent and dependent behaviour.

There was a time when the personal computer was celebrated as the ultimate tool of emancipation that would undermine the clout of large corporations and make it easy for citizens to educate themselves, share information and monitor their government.