Over the past few decades cell phones entered every aspect of life. Everyone now has cell phones. Your eight-year-old neighbor has one and so do your eighty-year-old grandparents. Cell phones have definitely made communicating easier. I can’t even remember of a time when cell phones didn’t exist. Whenever I needed to talk to someone I would just call him/her. More recently, phones have added more communication capabilities. Texting has become an affordable and effective way to talk to a friend. Unlimited texting is cheaper than unlimited minutes and texting allows you to respond whenever you have the time. The most recent addition is affordable mobile Internet. Phones with Internet capabilities are gradually becoming commonplace. I’d say that one in three of my friends have an iPhone or an Android smart phone. Not only can you call or text your friends all the time, but you can post on their walls or tweet to them from anywhere.
The question now is what can’t cell phones do. After all they allow people to be interconnected all the time. What cell phones can’t do is replace face to face talking. Although cell phones make it easier to connect to people, the quality of the communication is definitely worse. We’ve all had the friend who is constantly texting. You can’t have a five-minute conversation without him/her pulling out a cell phone. Is it too much to ask for the person to say, “Excuse me”? When you are eating dinner with a group of friends you are almost guaranteed to have someone texting. The increased functionality in cell phones has decreased the amount of time people spend physically interacting with one another. Cell phones are becoming more interesting than other people. I’ve seen a group of five or six people completely silent intent on their cell phones. Average people just can’t compete with the seemingly infinite information now available on a phone.
Cell phones breed a new generation of people without the attention span to maintain a conversation. They need the constantly flashing lights and colors to keep them looking. Little kids grow up with cell phones. In the airport, I saw a girl, not more than four years old, asking her dad to see his iPhone and then crying when he refused because he was currently using it. Parents give their kids cell phones at younger and younger ages. I remember when it was rare for a ten year old to have a cell phone. Now I think it is the other way around. My eight-year-old neighbor for example got a new iPhone for Christmas. That is her third phone (she received her first one when she was six).
Cell phones are a great way for people to communicate, but they are overused. A main cause of the problem is the portability of cell phones. People can take cell phones everywhere they go and they do.
I can definitely see where your argument against cell phones is coming from. I think Windows 7 advertisements try to push your same point across as well. I guess it IS a bad thing to always be on the phone, but they've just made cell phones so interesting that it's impossible to get off of it! It's like an addiction! I struggle to get through the day without using my cell phone. My cell phone keeps me awake in classes where I'm feeling a little drowsy.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you here - the ubiquity of both smartphones and mobile internet have made communication such a different entity today than it was five years ago. People text each other for everything, which sometimes makes life easier. There are times, however, that I tell friends to call people rather than texting because it is so much more efficient. People forget that their phones are made to call, not just for the internet and texting capabilities. I traveled abroad over winter break and lived for ten days without my iPhone - a very strange social experiment. Doing such simple things, like meeting up with my friends in the same hotel, became tasks within themselves. I often wonder what it would be like to go a week without using my iPhone, but I could never gather the courage to try it.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with this analysis of society. However, there could be a few positive things that arise from a generation constantly attached individuals. Today's young minds have adapted to live in a world where information is abundant and available. Over time, we have learned how to efficiently gather data from the internet and organize it in a way that makes sense for our needs. I always catch my parents asking me to look things up for them when we're in the car. It usually takes me a few seconds to pull up movie times, directions, or make a reservation at a restaurant. Give this task to a retired baby-boomer and it'll probably take a significantly longer amount of time to accomplish the same task.
ReplyDeleteI agree that while phones might make us smarter in some senses, I still have a very hard time with people who sit together not talking to each other, but texting people who are not present at the dinner. Unless it's an emergency text to the sitter, or something like that, I don't see the point. Why go out to dinner with people if you're going to spend your time texting different people? Why not stay home and text your heart out? But that's just me... (who is always delighted to get a text from my 9-year-old niece from her iPhone).
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