A friend of mine who just finished her five-year education in Germany came back to Beijing to look for a job. She has found the metropolis sharply changed, including the way Beijingers live.

"I have noticed almost every young man and woman stares at their smartphones on the subway," she said. "Things were totally different from when I left five years ago … and are also different from in Europe, at least in Germany, where people prefer reading a book on the subway," she added, holding her iPhone 4, an obsolete model that well-off young Chinese now spurn.

She was surprised at how the Chinese young generation have been so heavily addicted to smartphones in such a short period of time.

They have developed a "nomophobia" - no more phone phobia - a new term coined by psychologists after they have noticed many people find it hard to drop their smartphones for a few minutes.

Phone manufacturers and app developers must be pleased to see nomophobia infecting young people swiftly. This means their consumer base is expanding. But nomophobia is not a casual social phenomenon; it affects how people think and behave.

It sounds reasonable that communication technologies have overridden the barriers of distance, and are helping people get closer.

However, since the day face-to-face talks have been conveniently replaced by speech bubbles on the screen and a bunch of emoji, people have actually been drifted apart. When meetings can be made without having to meet physically, one can be alone forever and doesn't have to be involved in real social activities, in which actual relationships are bred.

Nomophobia might cause more concerns about how people acquire knowledge and information. Smart phone addicts tend to be in favor of short, quick and plain pieces of information, which is usually fragmented and biased. Fewer people would bother thinking deeper.

As a consequence, they become more easily distracted, fooled and used. If the tendency keeps getting deeper, focus and critical thinking will turn into scarce intellectual resources.

Smartphone users should pay more attention to how smartphone addiction are disturbing their lives and worsening their intellectual capacity.

It might sound too conservative but I recommend that we need to spare more time in a day to keep a distance away from smartphones, and seek valuable information and emotions from books and real communication.

We should realize that a quick and comprehensive access to information is not that useful to our lives, because it is not absorbed by our brains in an orderly and systematic manner. It only adds new burdens to the mind.

We live our life as a whole, not in fragments.

Yi Lian, a freelance writer based in Beijing