Smartphones are great – they do everything for us, literally everything! Sometimes I find myself wondering what we did pre smartphones? Writing letters to loved ones abroad instead of FaceTiming, trusting that your mates will turn up at a meeting point on time instead of whats’app messaging the whole way there, using a lighter instead of your torch app at a gig, bringing a camera, iPod and mobile phone with you leaving the house all seems quite alien to me!
There’s no doubt about it, smartphones are great inventions – all we need on one simple device that we carry around in our pockets! From the moment we wake up (or they wake us up!) to the second we go to sleep our smartphones are right by our sides for us to send messages, make calls, listen to music, check emails, read the news, go on social media, play games, navigate our way around an unfamiliar area, take photos, record videos, look up facts on google, check how much calories we’ve costumed, track how far we’ve walked, order taxis, do simple math on the calculator, check the times of public transport, find a potential date… the list is endless!
I read an article recently about a girl whose leg got stuck in a storm drain in China because she was glued to her phone and not paying attention to her surroundings. This isn’t the first accident caused by people being engrossed in their phones. In 2013, a woman fell off a pier while checking her Facebook page. We are all guilty of being distracted by our phones in one way or another, be it not listening to a conversation properly, bumping into a wall, walking into someone, having a door close on our face or worse again, falling down a drain! This makes me believe that as a generation we are addicted to smartphones.
Tecmark in the UK surveyed 2,000 smartphone users and found that on average a smartphone owner will check their phone 221 times a day and spend on average 3 hours a day looking at their phone. That’s 18.8% of our waking hours spent with our eyes staring down at a small screen, oblivious to the world around us. Each one of us witness this statistic on a daily basis, be it at a bus stop, on a train, in a café, restaurant or bar, in school, in work, at our dinner tables. It is happening all around us and what’s worse is that people are on their phones while in the company of others. Ofcom released a report, which stated that 51% of adults and 65% of teenagers say they have used their smartphone while socialising with others and 23% of adults and 34% of teens have used their smartphones during mealtimes. People today spend more time on their smartphones taking pictures and posting the photos on Social Media than enjoying the moment they’re living in. 23% of teenagers claim to watch less TV and if the TV is on it’s for background noise while being on their smartphone.
The generation of people who can use smartphones is getting younger and younger. I’ve witnessed 2 and 3 year old kids using their parents smartphones without any trouble. Some young children know how to use smartphones better than the owner of the device. This, along with the above statistics and seeing on a daily basis how people all around us are addicted to smartphones can be worrying, especially for our future as technologies continue to advance. As J.B Priestly said “The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”
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