DUE IN 24 HOURS
2 PEER RESPONSES
BRITTANY’S POST:
I think that smartphones have eliminated the art of conversation. Everything is limited to 140 characters or less. We may be in the same room together, but we’re not “together”. Each person is in their own universe, and their cell phone is the sun; everything revolves around that. If you don’t believe that’s true, watch any group of people when there’s only one charger.
Some of my best memories with my family are times when the lights were out, like from a hurricane. There was no power so that meant no TV, no computer, no video games, and no cell phones. We were forced to entertain ourselves and that meant interacting and communicating with each other. What I believed was a punishment, in the beginning, turned out to be a blessing.
Smartphones also eliminate conversations because we have the world at the tips of our fingers. We can “talk” to anyone anywhere via text message, Facebook message, Snapchat, etc. If we don’t want to discuss a particular issue, we just move on to the next person on the app and so on. In some ways, it allows us to live in a fantasy wherein we only deal with the issues we choose to deal with. Of course, this reprieve is temporary; however, for a time, we can pretend an issue doesn’t exist.
How would I change things? Maybe setting time restrictions on screen time and restrictions on messaging apps limiting the number so we must seek out real human interaction. Also seeking out personal growth and restrictions towards the psychological aspect of desiring so much screen time may be a good idea.
CAMERON’S POST:
I have always thought that smartphones take away from life and have always attempted to not be distracted by them when something meaningful is going on. This video has made me consider however, how much I could be missing out on in life simply by being on my phone. This video provided an excellent example of how one small moment of attentiveness had a lifetime of positive impacts but it is a moment that would by easy to spend on your phone and not think twice about it. I think that the overuse of phones is a leading reason for many of societies problems. The article below by Romeo Vielli cites a study in which teens today are less happy than those of the past generation. This decrease in happiness is a sharp reversal of the previous long term trend where teens seemed to become happier each generation. This would make a lot of sense with what the speaker highlighted about how a full lifetime is made up of lots of little things. When we miss the little things by being distracted, we miss a lot of what gives life meaning and happiness. I also believe that the majority of what we miss are the good things in life. Nobody really has the option to miss out on the bad things in life, those happen regardless. What we are often times forfeiting are the good things that we never got to experience. I believe that social media and technology as a whole is a great thing with many positive impacts however, like all technology, it simply gives us more capabilities. It is up to us to use those capabilities in a constructive manner.
Romeo Vielli. (2018, April 04). Are Smartphones Making Adolescents Less Happy? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201804/are-smartphones-making-adolescents-less-happy#:~:text=Results%20showed%20that%20adolescents%20who,and%20had%20lower%20self%2Desteem.
YouTube. (2014). Look Up | Gary Turk (Official Video). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY&t=9s.
