Touchscreens have taken over our lives

Telegraph

06-03-2025

Imagine the following routine. You jump into your car and drive to the high street, where, after paying for your parking, you do a top-up supermarket shop and buy a cup of coffee before an appointment with your GP, after which you return home and put your shopping in the fridge. What binds every stage of this everyday scenario, beyond wondering whether World War Three has broken out yet? Touchscreens. The above hypothetical situation would involve six interactions with swipeable screens, more if you check your phone again once you've used it to shell out for parking.
Touchscreens have colonised every aspect of our lives. Our cars, supermarkets, coffee shops, GP surgeries, banks, airports and kitchen appliances now rely on them, not to mention the apps we need to do everyday tasks from listening to a song, seeing who's at the door or checking the cricket score.
This supposed rush for convenience and efficiency – the reasons corporations and councils cite for touchscreen tyranny – has brought with it the depersonalisation of society. 'We prefer people to impersonal systems. We evolved to look people in the eye and to talk and interact with them,' says Andrew Przybylski, professor of human behaviour and technology at the University of Oxford. 'There are many positive, amazing things about technology that we get through a screen: we connect with communities; we can learn; we sometimes can save time. But there's a lot of dissatisfaction with what happens when you can't talk to a bank teller and you have to use an app on your phone… It is not a good thing to have AI and screens shoved into every corner of your life when you just want some milk.'
Mark Carrigan, senior lecturer in education at the University of Manchester, says that efficiency gains from better digital technology always carry a risk for interaction between actual humans. The key question, says Carrigan, is 'whether those gains can be used to free up people to interact in richer and more engaging ways, or whether they're used to process more people at a lower cost. Unfortunately it's almost always the latter.' In other words, do supermarkets use self-service tills so bosses can free up staff to help us in the aisles? Or are they used to save that supermarket time and money? Swipe left for the answer. As Carrigan points out, none of this is the fault of touchscreens per se – it's all about how organisations decide to use the technology.
Cars
Physical buttons in cars are being replaced by touchscreens at an alarming rate, and it's a huge bugbear, according to Telegraph readers. A whopping 97 per cent of new cars released after 2023 contain at least one touchscreen, a survey by S&P Global Mobility found. Many drivers find them fiddly, distracting, not user-friendly and potentially dangerous. A recent poll of Telegraph readers found that 91 per cent prefer physical buttons over screens.
Reader Oliver Burns drives a Kia EV6. He loves the car but he doesn't like its touchscreen, particularly when he has to lean over to switch between climate control and other functions. 'You have to lean right over to the left-hand side to change that function. So you are inevitably taking your eye off the road. I really think there are [safety concerns],' he says. Another reader, Peter Green, says that touchscreens' position to the left of the driver in a right-hand-drive car means that right-handed people – 90ish per cent of the population – 'struggle even more to prod them with our useless left hands'.
Meanwhile Colin Reed is happy with his Ford Mondeo – apart from the touchscreen. 'I spend my life working on a computer. The last thing I need is a computer experience in the car I'm driving,' he says. Car industry insiders say touchscreens allow manufacturers to save money on the tooling of switches and knobs, one of the reasons they're so common.
Supermarkets and coffee shops
Is there a more irritating phrase than 'unexpected item in baggage area'? I think not. There are an estimated 80,000 self-service tills in UK supermarkets, up from 53,000 in 2019, according to data from RBR Data Services. Customers aren't impressed. A 2022 petition calling for Tesco to 'stop the replacement of people by machines' was signed by 245,000 people. Some retailers report that self-scanning has increased shoplifting as frustrated customers feel they're owed the product due to the effort. But there are signs that the tide is turning.
In 2023 Preston-based supermarket Booths, dubbed the 'Waitrose of the north', axed nearly all the self-service tills in its 26 shops after customers labelled them 'impersonal' and 'unreliable'. At the time a Booths spokesperson said, 'We believe colleagues serving customers delivers a better customer experience.' Booths retained self-service checkouts in just two of its Lake District stores for customers during busy periods. Other retailers are following suit. Last year the boss of Morrisons, Rami Baitiéh, said the chain had gone 'a bit too far' with self-checkouts, while Asda said last year it will put more staff on checkouts.
A Tesco spokesman says the chain offers shoppers 'both types' of checkout: 'We are proud to offer customers choice when it comes to checking out and customers can always ask a colleague for a manned till to be opened.' A common complaint is that people with poor eyesight struggle to use the machines. Tesco has a 'zoomed in feature' on its self-service tills to enlarge the typeface to help partially-sighted people pay for their groceries, the spokesman says.
Marks & Spencer, meanwhile, has launched a specific till in its shops where people can chat to a cashier without being rushed. The 'it may take a little longer' initiative is designed to give the elderly, the lonely or those who may have no family or friends that opportunity to interact with a friendly human in their own time. Some people might argue that this used to be called 'going to the shops.' But in the rushed 2020s, it's something to be cheered.
But how about this for dystopian? I recently went to a coffee shop called Black Sheep Coffee on the Strand in London. Even though baristas were standing behind the counter (and not busy at the time), I still had to order my coffee via a touchscreen between us. I contacted Black Sheep Coffee online for this article to ask about the screens in its shops. I received an automated email: 'Your request 90608 has been received and will be reviewed by our team.' Sign of the times. Nice flat white, though.
GPs and hospitals
One area where touchscreens have arguably increased efficiency for the better is in the NHS. GP surgeries have touchscreens in their waiting rooms to allow people with appointments to check-in, thereby freeing up receptionists to answer phones or triage walk-in patients. These can cut the time a patient spends in the waiting room by half.
The NHS has also introduced 'urgent care self-service' kiosks in some A&E and UTC (Urgent Treatment Centre) departments of its hospitals. On arrival, patients answer questions about their symptoms by scrolling through a screen. The idea is that they can be prioritised or redirected elsewhere if needed, according to the NHS England website. However one newspaper reported last year that patients had to answer 14 pages of multiple choice questions before being asked whether they were losing lots of blood, which is either admirably thorough or somewhat risky, depending on your outlook and stage of exsanguination.
And, as will all touchscreens, elderly people may find this tricky. In a related issue, Age UK highlighted last year how smartphone apps and online booking systems are increasingly required to book GP and hospital appointments. 'Many [older people] are struggling with the rapid shift to online communication in the NHS,' the charity said, pointing out that one in three over-65s lack the basic skills to use the internet successfully while one in six don't use the internet at all. So-called digital exclusion is clearly problem in the touchscreen era, and Age UK said it can contribute to 'severe anxiety' amongst the elderly.
On the flipside, however, touchscreens in the home have been found to help people with dementia by keeping them engaged and relieving stress. The first reported use of touchscreens for people with the disease was as far back as 1986.
In the home
Touchscreens are starting to appear on everyday household appliances such as ovens, washing machines, dishwashers, coffee machines and lawn mowing robots. But at the forefront of this technology seem to be 'smart fridges', or fridges that are connected to the internet with a high-definition swipeable LED screen on the front. Many such fridges have cameras inside, so they can see when you're low on milk and send you a text telling you so. The camera also allows users who are out and about to check what they've 'got in' so they don't buy items they already have.
There's more. Many of the fridges can read barcodes, meaning they can compile recipe ideas based on what you do have or shopping lists based on what you don't have. Some also track expiration dates and send you reminders to eat the food before it goes off, thereby reducing food waste. Also, a smart fridge can talk to a smart oven so it preheats to the correct temperature depending on what recipe you've chosen.
Around a quarter of UK households currently have 'smart appliances', according to recent research from Statista. This is expected to rise to more than half of all households by 2029. But the big question here is whether such technology actually makes life simpler or is just whizzy for the sake of it.
Clever marketing is at play here, argues Przybylski. He says we use this all technology 'because we're sold the promise of time savings. And that is not the same as realising those time savings.' Take a banking app, for example. Paying for something with your phone is undeniably quicker than writing a cheque. But what happens when you have to 'do ten authentications' with one-off text message codes in order to use that app? 'The question on balance that you have to ask yourself is, 'Are these things really making it easier for me to live my life the way I want to live my life?'' says Przybylski.
It would be depressing enough if, thanks to the all-pervasive touchscreen tyranny, we'd sacrificed community for convenience. But the truth is far worse. In many cases, we've sacrificed community for inconvenience.