How often do you check your phone a day? 100 times, 500 times, 1000 times? According to PEW research center 64% of Americans in 2015 own a smartphone. We use smartphones in our everyday lives, so this number should not be surprising. We use it to connect with loved ones via texting, calling, or social media. That alone takes up a lot of our time, from group chats with the family to looking at what your friends are doing on snap chat. Not to mention this device holds our playlists, personal information, and countless apps to pass the time. The question I am posing is the obsession with iPhones directly related to stay connected with other people or used as a tool to pass the time.
When you are driving a car a smartphone plays a huge role. For starters, the GPS can help you get to your location, where before smartphones you would have to go to mapquest and print out the directions. Speaking from experience, trying to count miles in your head before the exit is a lot more stressful than it sounds. Also when in the car "the aux" is a privilege, and the way you play music is not with CD's, or even switching between radio stations, but with your Apple music or Spotify playlist. The idea of having thousands of songs at your fingertips is still astonishing to me. Next, comes the whole texting, calling, or snapping while driving. We all know how dangerous it is to be distracted while driving, but we all know someone who does it if we don't do it ourselves. That raises the conversation, is our obsession of staying connected that strong that we put our own safety at risk?
Smartphones has become our inquisitive crutch. Most people don't sit at the table and debate who the better quarterback, or better song this year they just use google or now our best friend Siri. This access to knowledge at our fingertips no doubt plays a role in the narrative that millennials are lazy, but that does not seem really fair to blame us for the situation we fell into; being born into technology. I see plenty of kids under the age of five playing with iPads and iPhones, while professionals use those devices for their everyday lives. I think it is important to accept that smartphones and this type of easy access technology is not only a part of our generation, but defines it. Whether kids born in this generation want to accept it, this type of technology will shape how society will be for the next generation. Ideas like cyber security, cyberbullying, and "being careful on what you post" is a problem we have, but one our parents did not have. That is why for millennials, they can not imagine a life without smartphones because the idea of easy access and social apps have been around for as long as we have. So it is just important to remember as we dive into the next model of iPhones or the new gadgets that we remember that these are just tools to stay more connected, and not the only way to stay connected.
