In this day and age, smartphones has caused my generation to enter a whole new world. We are currently obsessed with the modern technology and often get lost in all of the social media. People are mesmerized by instant interactions and information we can receive and are constantly checking their phones for new updates. A group of friends could all be sitting together but no one would be talking to one another because everyone would be reading their twitter or Facebook page. This type of communication is anything but social. We lose social skills by always communicating with people over phones and computers. This modern technology is like a cave that we cannot escape from. However, when one does leave the cave for a substantial amount of time, he realizes that communicating in person has far better perks than through a screen. Our society needs to educate the population that this technology is only good in small amounts and that it should not consume our life because it is not reality.

Cell phones force us to be anti-social, lose patience easily, use incorrect spelling and grammar and it limits our face-to-face interactions with one another. Many people that are my age received their first cell phone around sixth grade, and many of us struggle with social interaction. Nowadays, children are getting their own cell phones as early as the age of five and they are exposed to these gadgets even earlier. There is a big concern for children who are given cell phones at a young age. According to an article in the Huffington Post, children do not know how to handle face-to-face conflict because so much of their interactions occur through some sort of technology. In preschool, children are taught how to share, wait their turn, make friends, and good manners. Cell phones are now preventing these social skills from being taught because children are too caught up in technology than the real world. Since our face-to-face conflict is so limited, it causes us to be anti-social and lose patience quickly. Cell phones allow us to have immediate access to information and when we have to wait more than a split second for something we start to get anxious. Children already lose patience quickly but by exposing them to technology at early ages we will be decreasing their chances to learn how to wait for anything.

Cell phones have also caused a big issue with spelling and grammar. Since texting and social media is now our main form of communication, people have began to use abbreviations to speak to one another. In addition to abbreviations, people add extra letters to words, include punctuation marks to look like smiley faces and they do not use the necessary grammar skills such as capitalizing the first word in a sentence. This eases our ways of communication when we send a quick text message to a friend but a problem occurs when we are no longer texting and we are now typing an important paper. Students are now using texting lingo in all of their schoolwork. Children are not practicing the proper skills that they are going to need in the real world which could lead to having a large negative effect in their futures. Can you imagine someone typing a resume for a new job using texting lingo? On top of that, they would struggle through the job interview because of the lack of social skills that they have. As you can see, there are many negative effects to cell phones and we need to change our ways of communication while we still can.