Wrong Number

I can honestly say I am not addicted to my smartphone. Addicted to tech and blogging maybe, but not to the phone, thank god but to many other poor souls, this is simply not the case.

Given how quickly cellphones have taken over our lives, it’s easy to forget that they are still a relatively new technology. The first iPhone came out eight years ago, and today a little more than half the American population has a smartphone, according to eMarketer.

Yet already people spend close to three hours a day looking at a mobile screen — and that excludes the time they spend actually talking on the phones.

In a recent survey of smartphone use by Bank of America, about a third of respondents said they were “constantly” checking their smartphones, and a little more than two-thirds said that they went to bed with a smartphone by their side. Those habits have prompted enough soul searching that a slew of new companies see a business opportunity in helping people cut back.

“Technology has evolved so quickly that we have spiraled out of control and nobody has stopped to think about how this is going to impact our lives,” said Kate Unsworth, the founder of a British company, Kovert, that also makes high-tech jewelry to filter out everything but the most urgent stuff.

It gets better, especially when somebody does something about it, especially when cluelessness is part of the equation.

A scene from "Shows for Days" with, from left, Dale Soules, Patti LuPone and Michael Urie

At Wednesday’s matinee of the Douglas Carter Beane comedy “Shows for Days,” in which Ms. LuPone plays a small-town theater diva, four cellphones went off, twice from the same phone. It created, as Ms. LuPone put it, “a cacophony of noise.”

So Ms. LuPone was on edge by the evening performance at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. And when the woman seated at the end of the second row texted — and texted and texted — during the show, Ms. LuPone took action. Without breaking character, Ms. LuPone walked into the audience and took the woman’s phone. “She didn't know what was going on,” Ms. LuPone said in a phone interview on Thursday. “I should be a sleight of hand artist.” (The phone was returned after the show.)

Awesome!