As Andrew always tells us in class, cell phones can be detrimental to a student’s grade, but how do cell phones affect students in other ways? With all this new technology, I feel like people are losing the art of communicating and destroying relationships with friends. What I mean by this is that people are starting to not be able to talk to a person without looking at their phone. We can txt and call people with our phones but people are starting to become bad at real time talking face to face.
As I was researching this topic, I cam across an article on Time.com saying how cell phones are starting to affect peoples relationships. This article talked about a study done by Psychology of Popular Media Culture were they asked couples how they felt about their partners cell phone use. They found out that the more a person was dependent on their phone, the less their partner felt that the relationship would work out. So now we are starting to see how phones are affecting us out of the classroom.
Now when it comes to talking to people, I think everyone is guilty of looking at their phone at least one time while having a conversation. As it turns out, that is extremely detrimental to your conversation and relationship with the person you are talking to. A study
was done at Virginia Tech where they picked 100 people to have conversations with random people. The people would talk for ten minutes each, but half of the people had to talk about a boring a tree while the other half had to talk about a momentous moment in their life. Then the researchers studied how many times people looked their phone.
As you could have guessed, the people with the tree conversation looked at their phone more than the other group. The researchers asked the person who did not go on their phone how they felt about their partner being on their phone and they said that they felt disconnected. These people did not feel that their other partner was interested in their conversation and was said to feel that their partner did not care what they were talking about. You may think that only going on you phone for a few seconds during a conversation isn’t hurtful, but this study shows how wrong you would be.
The creation of cell phones was a momentous step for technology and has created a lot of good in the world. You can now talk to people across the world, find out news from anywhere, and so much more. There are so many pros to having a cell phone that many people forget the cons. Cells phone have made us too dependent on them and are affecting our everyday lives. Kids stop learning to spell and just use spellcheck on their phone, they distract us in class and even on dates, and simply just take up too much of our attention that we could be spending on other things. In my opinion, we value our phones too much and should cut back our usage on them.
Phones are a great invention and have helped so many people since they were invented, but we are starting to overuse them. We are using them in classes, which affect our learning ability, and we are also affecting our personal skills and relationships when we over use our phones. All you have to do is put your phone down and enjoy the time you are spending with a person or in class.
Side note… A Samsung phone exploded in one of my friend’s classes the other day and disrupted the class while also sending the student to the hospital. Watch out!
http://time.com/4311202/smartphone-relationship-cell-phone/
http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/science-explains-exactly-how-your-phone-is-ruining-your-relationships.html
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/reply_to_a_cell_phone_story_complaint/
I think another big way that cell phone usage is impacting our daily lives is in relation to jobs and the work force. Today, it is very common to have an interview for a job or internship over Skype. Personally, I hate the idea of this. I mean, I guess if you live across the country it is ok, but you can tell so much more about a person and who they are from actually seeing them face to face. I think that companies should be more aware about this and the new employees that they are hiring. Also, companies are starting to integrate apps into their daily routines. For example, I had an internship over the summer that required us to clock in at the beginning of the day and clock out at the end of the day. However, the clock website also had an app. This was a big deal because people could clock in and out from the app in their cars while actually not being at work! Yes, technology has made a great impact on our lives, but in some way it is also harming us.
I completely agree with your point on people having a conversation and texting. I actually have a rule; if the person starts to text, I will stop talking. It people aren’t 100% into your conversation that what is the point of wasting your breath. I am going to correlate this with multi-tasking. People are trying to maybe google something or text someone, while talking to a person in person! When people multi-task they are not giving their all to each task which ends in lousy results for both the tasks.
I think it would be a great experiment if in that same study that you talked about, if the people who looked at their phones, could questioned about the trees. Or any other topic talked about. We can test them, and really see how much of the conversation they were really listening too. the x-variable would be them on their phones, and the y variable would be to see how much information they really got out of that conversation.