ARE smart phones making us dumb? My own phone isn't smart enough to make me dumb, so I can excuse myself on those grounds, if no other. But everywhere you turn, people gaze down at their phones instead of looking at the world around them.

This even happens on the TV-viewing sofa at home. My wife's phone is smarter than mine. Well, she's probably smarter than me too, but don't tell her I said so.

There she is, phone in hand, fiddle-fiddling. Now if I had such a phone I would be similarly distracted. But I don't, so I glance at the newspaper instead, holding on to lovely old newsprint like a drowning man grasping at a passing straw.

My three grown-up children are always looking at their smart phones. The middle one breaks off occasionally to flip and spin his phone, round and round it goes. It has been pointed out that this habit sits at the sharp end of the annoyance spectrum. But the boy can't help himself, so the phone goes round again.

As for my not-so-smart phone, this occasionally reminds me that I have ten pence credit remaining. Sometimes my old friend 'unknown' phones, but I never answer.

There are occasional texts from one of our three, usually our daughter. Sometimes a text arrives from my 82-year-old father, who likes a bit of texting. His phone is smarter than mine, too.

Messages from family are cheerful and I enjoy those. But still I worry what smart phones do to us.

An example sometimes given is of a couple at a restaurant, each with a phone in hand, not looking at each other, their fellow diners or the view from the window. Instead they communicate with people other than the flesh-and-blood person sitting opposite.

In this vein I saw a couple in a coffee shop with a laptop apiece. They spent the whole time doing anything other than engaging with each other – odd but, well, oddly normal nowadays.

So do I really want such a smart phone? Well, I can answer a confident "yes and no" to that.

Yes, because everyone else has one and they seem to be fun; no, because I'll only find new ways to waste time. Over my shoulder I can still hear Shakespeare's Richard II from A-level days: "I wasted time and now doth time waste me."

Time-wasting has moved on since then. It's doubtful whether Shakespeare would have written a word if he'd had Twitter and Facebook as available distractions.

Last week the historian Simon Schama pointed out the ways in which smart phones and selfies are changing how we look at the world. Announcing a new display he will be curating at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Schama made a plea for the selfie generation to look up from their smart phones.

He said people should look at each other for a change. "Go and travel on the tube and you'll see people are losing that sense of actually eye-balling each other,'" he said. "It's something which is elemental, it's our first human act."

He also made the deeper point that looking at people was fundamental to being human – and that doing so derived "protection, sustenance and connection into the human world".

Quite right, sir. All this phone-absorption could get us out of the habit of looking at another face. Watching people is part of what we have always done, isn't it? As regards selfies, Schama criticised their "quick dumbness", saying that they might be of the moment, "but the true object of art is endurance".

The novelist Philip Hensher, in a newspaper column about this topic, worried that artists and writers will lose the outward gaze they need to develop their art, to the point where looking at people could even become scandalous.

As for the social globe, how will we ever register an interest in each other; how will a half-smile or a passing glance across a crowded room lead us further into human engagement if we are all heads down and messing around on our phones?

Oh, and if you happen to be reading this on a smart phone, the end is nigh and you are now free to look up again.