Is mobile-phone use as antisocial as smoking?

Nowadays mobile phones are everywhere and many people use them in public places without thinking about others. Some people compare this behaviour to smoking, and in my opinion this comparison is quite reasonable.

There are many similarities between the two habits. Firstly, both of them disturb the people around. When a person smokes in a restaurant, everybody has to breathe the smoke, and when a person speaks loudly on the phone on a train, everybody has to listen to their private conversation. Secondly, both habits are addictive. Smokers cannot stop smoking and many young people cannot put their phone down even for one hour, checking social media constantly. Thirdly, both of them are bad for health. Smoking causes cancer, and looking at a screen for many hours causes problems with the eyes, the neck and also with sleeping.

Moreover, phone use in public is often very rude. In cinemas the light of a screen disturbs other viewers, and in restaurants families sit together but nobody talks because everyone is looking down at a small screen. This is a sad situation for our society and it is getting worse every year. I have seen this many times in my own family, where my younger cousins bring their phones to the dinner table and my aunt has now made a rule that everybody must leave them in the hall before they sit down.

In conclusion, I agree that using a mobile phone in public is similar to smoking, because both habits are addictive, harmful and annoying for other people.

Before answering whether phones should be banned as smoking is, the comparison itself needs examining, because it is doing more work in this argument than it can bear. Smoking indoors was banned on a specific and narrow ground: it measurably harmed the lungs of people who had not chosen it. Phone use in public is irritating, which belongs to a different category altogether — and legislatures do not usually ban irritation.

That distinction matters because the strongest arguments against public phone use are all arguments about manners. A loud call on a quiet train is intrusive in the way a loud conversation between two passengers is intrusive, and we have never proposed banning conversation. Once the harm is social rather than physical, the appropriate instrument is a norm, not a law — and norms are enforced by a look from a stranger, at no cost to anybody's liberty.

There is nevertheless a limited case for restriction, and it is already conceded in practice. Cinemas ask for screens off, hospitals restrict use near equipment, quiet carriages exist and are policed by other passengers, and aircraft impose rules during take-off. What these share is not annoyance but a specific incompatible activity: everyone in that space is doing one thing that a phone demonstrably ruins. Extending restrictions on that basis is coherent. Extending them because phone use is antisocial is not, since it would license bans on a great deal else.

So: yes to bans in named places where a competing activity justifies them, and no to a general prohibition modelled on smoking. The analogy is rhetorically powerful and legally hollow.