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A CEMA Summit 2024 participant uses a hand crank to raise a balloon in order to vote on the answer to a question. The event company Projectory replaced app-based polling tools with the balloons at the event. (Whatever Media Group)
Maybe you can relate: Over the last decade, the percentage of U.S. adults who said they use their smartphones too much climbed from 39 percent in 2015, to 58 percent in 2022, according to a Gallup survey.
That rise — nearly 50 percent over seven years —was noted in a recent Washington Post story, “You’re Staring at Your Phone Too Much at Work, and It’s Costing You.” The compulsion to look at your phone during work hours any time you get a new message or notification, or if boredom creeps in, the article noted, could result in distraction and lost productivity. But much of the article was devoted to the potential damage that smartphone use could cause to relationships at work, such as the loss of connection when meeting participants break eye contact by repeatedly checking their phones, or even just appear to check out when they use their phones to take notes.
Those same trends — the increasing amount of time spent on our phones and the negative impact of our digital absorption on relationships — also showed up in a recent Harris Poll, which looked at Gen Z and their use of social media. More than 60 percent of the Gen Z respondents said they spent at least four hours — and 23 percent reported spending seven or more hours — a day using social media. At the same time, three in five said they think social media has had a negative impact on society, a percentage comparable to the 66 percent of Americans of all ages who view social media negatively. Two out of five Gen Z survey respondents said they wished that social media had never been invented.
That ambivalence toward social media is fueling a movement toward spaces where smartphones are banished — at least temporarily. The Offline Club, an organization founded in the Netherlands, offers phone-free spaces where people can get together to talk, read, play games, or just hang out. Launched in February in Amsterdam, Offline Club events have quickly spread to four more Dutch cities, as well as London, Paris, Barcelona, Dubai, Milan, and Aarhus, Denmark. The founders aren’t against technology — they use digital platforms, including Instagram (@theoffine_club) to organize events. Their aim, they told The Guardian, is encourage individuals to become more conscious about their relationship with technology. “We are about inspiring people to implement the offline lifestyle more often into their lives,” co-founder Ilya Kneppelhout told the newspaper, “and to have a relationship with their digital devices that they are happy about, that doesn’t negatively impact them.”
In the world of events, attention to the power of building relationships offline also is on the rise, visible in the rising numbers of meeting participants who prefer to meet and learn in person and the fact that a majority, according to the Freeman Trends Report: 2024 Attendee Intent and Behavior, say they are most positively influenced by immersive experiences, compared to other experiences at events. Shared experiences help make events memorable, such as the audience joining together to sing at the opening of Convening EMEA 2023 or old-school moves like speakers standing at the door to personally welcome participants as they arrive for a session.
At CEMA Summit 2024, Projectory, an event company that specializes in creating playful, meaningful interactions, replaced app-based polling tools with balloons attached to hand cranks during a session. Participants used the cranks to raise the balloons to heights that matched their levels of agreement to a series of questions — which meant that most participants were looking up at the ceiling, not down at their phones.
It’s worth noting that in the Harris Poll, a minority of Gen Z respondents — one in five — thought that the world would be better off without smartphones, compared to nearly half who wished that TikTok and X, formerly Twitter, had never been invented.
I find it hard to imagine navigating a conference without my phone — a well-designed event app can simplify registration, build event agendas, provide maps and, through AI-powered chatbots, provide instant sessions summaries and answers to logistical questions, not to mention eliminating the need for printing thousands of pages of paper. The challenge is to keep smartphones in their place — as a tool, not a destination.
Convene Podcast
Listen to the Convene Talk in which editors discuss breaking the phone habit.