Smartphoning it in. A recent survey from Pew Research Center shows that the number of Americans with smartphones has jumped to 64%—a 29% increase since 2011. Despite the fact that the great majority of those smartphone owners (90%) have other means of accessing the Internet from home, 35% of them “frequently” use their phones to follow along with breaking news, 62% of them have used their phones to look up information about a health condition, and 57% have used their phones to do online banking. Whether someone has used his or her smartphone to access career opportunities, according to Pew, is largely dependent on whether a person is what the research firm calls “smartphone-dependent”—i.e., one of the 10% of Americans with no high-speed Internet access beyond their smartphones’ data plan. Of the smartphone-dependent people surveyed by Pew, 63% used their phones to access job openings in the last year, and 39% used their phones to submit job applications in the last year. Of the overall pool of cell phone owners surveyed by Pew, only 43% and 18% performed those job-search related activities, respectively.
Schadenfacebook. Bummed out by all of your friends’ check-ins at swanky restaurants and photos of their perfect offspring in your newsfeed? It turns out that you can get a handle on the depression that we’ve come to associate with social media use without swearing off your virtual networks altogether. Forbes reports that two new studies—one by the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology and one out of the University of Houston—have attributed the negative feelings that social media users sometimes experience to the same underlying mechanism: social comparison. And that’s something you can control. So the next time you find yourself clicking back through your old college buddy’s montage of his trip to Machu Picchu, remember: Most people only post the highlights of their experiences, not the reality of their daily lives. And, Forbes’s contributor suggests, “it wouldn’t hurt to post about those quieter, less glamorous moments, too. That might actually go a long way in making people feel more connected, instead of just the opposite.”
