The smartphones bring so many advantages for the society, with the new technologies a person that is the United States can talk to another one that is in China, for example, just with one call or even via text messages. This new devices are making the world “smaller”, they make much more easier to share your ideas, thought and experiences whenever you want.
As the smartphones are small and light you can bring with you to wherever you want to go, so you can be connected to the entire world 24 hours per day. The most used feature of smartphones is the Internet, but actually the most used apps are not the internet browsers. The most used apps are the Twitter, Facebook, etc. Summarizing the social apps, where you can share your pictures, thoughts and experiences as you can see another people pictures, thoughts and experiences and you can still comment about them.
The smartphones still have a lot of features and apps that can help not only the communication between people, but can help their work. The most recent devices have some awesome features that allow the user to open Word, Excel, Power Point documents among others. So you can work on important projects while you take a bus to home or while you are stuck on the traffic. You can also be always connected with the news about your city or even news around the world.
But the main problem in the new generation of smartphone users, teenagers between the ages of 15-25 years old, is the overuse of it. Each day you see more people using their smartphones almost 24 hours a day and sometimes I got concerned about it because some people rather use their smartphone to do something else instead of interact with someone that is right by their side.
Based in observation, as I don’t have a smartphone I frequently see someone completely focused in their smartphone that they ignore everyone else that is around them. Imagine a world that you don’t need to leave your room anymore, you could do whatever you need just using your smartphone, we would lose completely our human interaction. Of course this is an extreme scenario, but we are getting closer to this every single day.
I fear the day when technology overlaps our humanity. It will be then that the world will have permanent ensuing generations of idiots (Einstein). Actually, in this quote, Einstein is talking about the atomic bomb, but we can still use this quote to analyze the overuse of smartphones. As the time spent by the users using their smartphones increase more they become dependents of their smartphones.
I have to join in the voice of critics who yearn for a simpler, less technical age. It's not that I wish to return to the pre-computer age, of paper and pencil, however. Instead, I'm worried that we risk having our brains become vestigial organs (Whitbourne, 2011). This sentence explains our actual situation, as we use our phones all the time even to do simple things as talk to someone we kind of lose our speaking abilities.
Other example is the overuse of the GPS, a very useful tool for when you’ve never been in your destination before. But, nowadays people are using to navigate in their own hometown.
But the main point of this paper it is about human interaction and the big question is: Does smartphones help us to have more social interaction or make us lose our ability to interact with other people?
If you have a smartphone you can still communicate with a lot of people even being alone in your room, you can text, call, send pictures and videos and much more just having your smartphone with you. And this not problem, but the problem is when you already are with your friends, for example, and you keep using your phone.
As I don’t have a smartphone I started to observe how my friends act while hanging out with other friends. Some of them, when using their phones, completely ignore everyone and everything around them.
After a while trying to answer the question if smartphones help ours social relations are not, I think I found the best answer and this answer is: No, the problem is not the smartphone, but the way someone uses it.
In my point of view, smartphone users need to control themselves in relation of their phone. They need to find a point of equilibrium where you can still enjoy of every single feature of their smartphone, but still interact with people that are closer to them. For example, turn it off your phone when you are lunching with your friend, or when you are in an event or party. This would help you to not lose your ability to interact with people personally.
When you privilege the relationships mediated by smartphones we are compromising ours real social skills (Giglio, 2012). So, one of the solutions to this problem would be turn off your smartphone more often when you are interacting with people that are around you. To make this more acceptable you can do some games with your friends to make this disconnection of the smartphones world more fun.
One of these games could be the Phone Stacking, where everyone in the table place your smartphone in the center of the table, and the first one to pick his phone to check his texts, calls or other notifications need to pay the next drink or one of the other drinks. This is a fun way to doesn’t use your smartphone while you are hanging out with your friends, it is a good idea to offer to your friends.
Another solution is talk to your friends, ask them to not bring their smartphones or turn them off in the next you are going to meet, so you can talk more and have more fun together. Most of them probably cannot imagine themselves without their phones for a couple of hours, but if you can convince them to do it a few times they will see that it is not so bad and you can enjoy better the time with your friends.
The group that is more affected by this addiction is the teenagers, most of them think they need to be connected to the internet and to everyone 24 hours per day. The best solution for this case would be time restrictions determined by their parents, so they get used to don’t use their smartphone during moments like breakfast, lunch, dinner, study time, family celebrations, etc.
As far as smart phones are revolutionizing the mode of communication and enhancing the levels of interaction between remote and urban people, they are alienating and limiting people interactions. However, smart phones are helping connect individuals whose relationships are complicated by geography and distance. Despite being of importance uniting distant individuals, smartphones have helped extend the gap between close individuals while increasing distance between them.
It is apparent that the coming into force of smart phones has held back oral communication greatly. In my considered opinion, despite bringing with it advanced computing capability, in the ethic aspect, it is not of much importance to get a smartphone. This is because it will help one distant him/herself from close persons.
Yes, smartphones come with many benefits that can be used as a library, it can multitask etc. but it can influence your social life negatively. Having said that, because technology explosion cannot be controlled, individuals need to acquire these new gadgets but not let their lives be controlled fully by these objects. Let them control the use of these smartphones to be able to interact with their friends and colleagues freely.
References
Gabrielle Principe (2011, October). Retrieved November 17, 2012, from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-childhood/201110/hold-the-smartphone-please