Sowing Confusion Episode 3 Sponsor: The Smartphone Trade Association of America: Smartphones Making You Feel Dumber Since 2007

A soundbite from this video interview was pulled into the actual mockumentary for the skit documentary from the Smartphone Trade Association of America

On our Branson episode, we decided to do a satire on break-ups and do sort of dark humor referencing a horrible tragedy involving the Ride the Ducks Attraction from 2018. The project utilizedvoice characters from Chat GPT, sounds with a Creative Commons.0 license from freesound.org, and music generated from my Corel VideoStudio proX8 studio software.

Well as we progress forward, we kicked our production up a notch in episode 3. Since we are looking at technology, I decided to tackle and satirize the smart phone. I also decided to challenge myself in the bit this time. I continued utilizing the sound effects and music tools, but I went with some new acting options where I created my narrative character's voice and traits through an Artificial Intelligence program called ElevenLabs. The bit this time was a documentary called "Great Moments in Communication History" Sponsored by the Smart Phone Trade Association of America.

The Inspiration

Smart phones observationally have this zombie effect on people. I feel it has been the start of our civil discourse falling apart in such a way where we have started to not know how to communicate or be civil to each other. We sit behind a screen and instead of the emotional tone of a voice saying hi how are you it is so much easier to just send texts that could be misread or taken out of context to someone. One of the major problems with texting is you cannot interpret the emotional tone of how the individual is doing that you can pick up a lot easier when you hear someone's voice. Unfortunately, we live in an era where we all to a certain extent have to text, but I do not think it has helped our societal dialogue.

The phone also has resulted in people just zoning out and not wanting to acknowledge others. You are at a store or a place with a line and instead of the old days where you may have had to say hi, you can now just keep your head in the phone and be oblivious to everything. I myself am not perfect and have found myself doing that a time or two and try to snap myself out of it because it is not healthy to do that.

The obliviousness has caused incidents where people have done selfies and ended up getting hurt or killed because they did not watch where they were going. In some cases, people were texting and would fall into a fountain or a large body of water due to hypnotically being addicted to the task on their phone.

If the show was a video podcast i would find a way to produce the following skit and make sure that it would translate in both audio and visual media formats. The set up would be a public service announcement (PSA) of myself and my best friend texting each other in separate camera close-up shots from what looks like different indoor locations about how we are looking forward to catching up during our upcoming overseas vacation to Thailand. Eventually, as the advertisement moves on, a close-up of me texting starts panning out and you discover that we are actually in the same room sitting 10 feet side by side directly across from each other. The PSA would then end with the announcer saying, "Say no to smart phones and say yes to human interaction. Smart phones making people dumber since 2007."

The Podcast Skit

The story is that the Smart Phone Trade Association bought time during our commercial break for public relations purposes. Trade associations love public relations campaigns to influence public opinion but also lobby government legislators to advocate for or against bills that serve their interest. I thought it would be brilliant to do a nice documentary showcasing great moments throughout history in human communication, from the dawn of time with the caveman through the present day and looking towards the future now with the advent of the smartphone.

Podcast Materials and Inspirational Insight

In March, I had the pleasure of attending a great conference in Austin, TX called Neurodiversion 2025. It was one of the top highlights of my year in terms of growth and education. I learned a lot of things regarding neurodiversity, ADHD, and autism that I deal with in my personal life as well as tools to help me manage those challenges.

I had the pleasure of meeting a great presenter named Karla Starr who had a great presentation on AI tools and hacks. She had some excellent resources in the AI space including a ton of prompts, commands, and tools to help you manage, create, and organize structure and help accommodate your way of processing. One of her best features though was her rundown of the various AI platforms from ChatGPT, Anthropic, Claude, and ElevenLabs to name a few. Her knowledge was very helpful with some of the tools I put together in making this podcast. From the presentation that she gave, I found out about ElevenLabs which has been an amazing tool for some of the parody ads created this season.

What makes ElevenLabs awesome is I can write up a description of a person's age, culture, ethnicity, background, gender, personality, demeanor and once I submit those to the server, ElevenLabs will provide me with three voice samples, from which I will choose the one I feel most portrays that character. It is the most amazing tool. The voice selections they offered for my narrator were spot on. ElevenLabs will only allow you to save three distinct voice characters at a time on their free plan which is what I utilize. Because this was completed months ago, I have since deleted the narrator character from my profile to make room for more recent ones.

Script

Next, i proceeded to write up the script for the ad. Given that the podcast is treated like a traditional radio show, it was critical that the listener's imagination be taken on a journey they can visualize so there had to be sound effects that come alive since there is no visual media in the podcast.

I also wanted this to feel serious as this was a mockumentary, as I balance seriousness with sarcasm. When I mapped this out, I decided to cut right in with the dawn of time starting with cavemen and then go straight to the Middle Ages. In the first couple of sound bites dealing with cave men and church bells, those sounds came from freesound.org. I searched for cave men and church bells using a creative commons 0 filter, and those files were two that came up and were excellent.

Another new wrinkle in this ad, is I actually inputted real historic soundbites when we got later into the timeline. When Alexander Graham Bell is referenced, I was able to find a soundbite of Alexander Graham Bell through a legitimate history channel on Youtube. I managed to capture this audio and other historic soundbites via Audacity. This continued when you hear the Hindenburg crash associated with the narrator talking about the medium of radio and Neal Armstrong's moonwalk associated with the medium of television.

We proceed to the modern era where we associate the PC and Internet with dialup modem effects, the Today Show anchors being clueless about the Internet, and the famous America Online You've Got Mail announcement.

We then get to our trade association's moment of truth, which is 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the Iphone to the world. We portray this as a historic milestone of significant proportions before we dive into the satirical commentary. I start off with our narrator discussing individuals taking selfies on mountainside cliffs only to fall off to their sudden death using freesound.org sound effect.

The next part of the script and the follow-up audio piece is the audio clip of that lady who fell into the mall water fountain. While there are plenty of stories about it, I purposely sought out the specific interview where she gave the play-by-play of how it happened to prove that this was in fact a real incident.

We proceeded back to more silly sounds and scenarios that I wrote based on my observations on smart phones. I finally wrapped it up with an old stand-up bit I did about the evolution of words, indirectly referencing how we are not taken to a mental facility for talking to voices in our head because we are talking into a Bluetooth and how a dentist has to jump through hoops now if he scolds us for having a Bluetooth.

The Tag Line

We end with the narrator and announcer mentioning that the ad was paid for by the Smart Phone Trade Association of America. They wrap up the ad saying smart phones are a true technical marvel that have been making us feel dumber since 2007. This is something I have always felt since I got my first smartphone in 2019. For instance, you type words in, the device will change what you wrote, and the sentence will not make sense or be entirely misspelled. If that does not happen, the phone will butt dial people you did not mean to call when your phone is in your pocket resulting in them hearing God knows what private moments are happening at any given time.

Final Thoughts

This ad showcased how I feel about modern technology. While I do embrace it, I do feel it has resulted in us becoming mind numb which has led to a lack of civility, and the deep divisions we are seeing play out in our society. I do not have a solution as to how to solve this problem, but one way we can solve it is by lessening our screen time and being more present and in the moment with everyone in our lives. If there are friends and family further away, instead of using the smart phone to text them, use it to video call and say hello. When we do this it brings a higher level of emotional depth and feeling that a text can never do..

I recognize for some folks like myself, who are neurodivergent that it may be easier to just text than do a video or voice chat. The best rule of thumb is to check with your close friends and family to see what works best for them and act accordingly. At the end of the day however, you at least are respecting what works for them. and that helps bring more civility back into daily life.

I will tell you this, I recognize that we sometimes do have to communicate via text. and do not have a choice in some instances. But I do hope we can think about ways we can mitigate our reliance on smart phones and work on being more present in engaging with others of different cultures, values, and beliefs so that we can empathize and understand each other. If we all would take the time to do that, the world will be better off.

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References:

CNN clip woman falling in fountain: https://youtu.be/1QtzD6i6Knw?si=8M1QMJvZSLjD_njd

Elevenlabs: Elevenlabs.io

Neurodiversion conference: https://neurodiversion.org

Karla Starr: kstarr.com

Follow us on socials: @confusedstate5