At the age of 20, I am stuck in a technology dependent society that is moving faster than the speed of light—or so it seems.
From the moment I wake up, to the moment I shut my eyes at night, my phone is in my hands, in my coat pocket, or by my side literally all day long. It is my lifeline, my habit that I will most likely never break, and my biggest distraction.
I used to be in love with my phone. Completely obsessed with it and I didn’t care what anyone said. My parents would say, “you are always on your phone Abby.” I would simply try and deny it, shut off the screen, and set it down on the counter for a maximum of five minutes before I would pick it up, and become completely consumed in my social media world all over again.
They were right. I was always (and still am for the most part) on my phone. It wasn’t until I started realizing through my own relationships, friendships, family members, and peers how much our small hand-held devices completely control us, and how annoying it is. Everywhere I go I see people of all ages glued to their phone…the grocery store, the line at Starbucks, restaurants, public bathrooms, and even while driving.
Aside from the fact that I may always be wasting my time by refreshing my Instagram feed, or burning my cellular data by checking snap stories on Snapchat, my phone has given me a bigger reason to hate it. It fuels my insecurities, and it is the biggest source of my unnecessary social anxiety. I never imagined that my phone was capable of making me feel so anxious, and causing me to have so many uncertainties about my relationships and my image.
The constant doubts run in my head, and I find myself questioning, “it has been thirty minutes, and he still hasn’t responded to my text. Did I do or say something wrong?” Or more common than not, my friends and I bounce back and forth to each other, “no one is liking my Instagram…do I look bad in it? Should I delete it and post it at another time?”
Unfortunately, that’s just the surface of it all. Forget the social anxiety and the common insecurities. What about our communication skills? What about our friendships and our relationships? What about our integrity?
Our access to this incredible, crazy advanced technology has caused myself and many others to develop a lack of patience and communication skills within our relationships. We don’t have time to work through any issues with each other because that takes too much work, and we want it all to be resolved immediately. We apologize to our friends and loved ones over text, and we rely on emoticons to express our emotions instead of actually doing it in person.
As one of many in the millennial generation, we want everything instantly, and the world has learned how to satisfy that. At the touch of a fingertip, we can order just about anything to our front door and expect to get it within the next 24 hours. If we want to talk to that cute classmate in biology, we text them. We don’t have to wait until the next day to see them and actually generate face-to-face conversation. No, let's just make it easier, and completely satisfy all of our desires immediately.
Any and all of our answers to the most simple, or the most complex questions and ideas can be answered within seconds by a search engine. Our homework, online quizzes, and research papers just got that much easier thanks to you, Google. Students are finding it easier to cheat than to not. Texting the answers for homework, or during a test has become a common problem many schools face. Our integrity is challenged more than ever due to our ability to take the easy way out with just the click of a button.
So, as I’m out to lunch with my friends and I take a moment to pause and look around, all of us are impatiently waiting for our food, and trying to surpass the time by scrolling through Facebook, or snapchatting a friend back. Our generation is at a complete loss for real face-to-face conversations, and our emotions and actions are all influenced by what is going on in our social media bubble. So many of my conversations with my friends and peers don’t even feel real because it's just a matter of time until once of us reaches for our phone, and interrupts the conversation by responding to a text.
In a world that is changing faster than I can even fathom, it is crazy for me to imagine what the technology world will be like five years from now. Ten years? Fifty years?
Technology has given us many opportunities to explore and better the world within medicine, education, transportation, safety and protection, and communication. But, in the middle of it all, have you ever stopped to think about what it is doing to our character, personalities, relationships and experiences?
