I'm about to become one of those people. You know, the one who rants about how there's no more face-to-face contact and in its place is only phone-to-phone communication. It's not my intent to preach about it. I just know that personally something has to change for me.

We all need to realize a few things. We have replaced common sense with convenience. We fail to think about what we post because our phones do most of our thinking. We've begun living through our phones. We observe through a lens rather than with our eyes. We speak with text messages instead of talking out loud.

We live in a time of notifications and constant pop-ups. Our response time for texts or DMs are nearly immediate. Yet when we find ourselves across the table from someone, conversation fails to come that easily. As soon as our phones vibrate or ding, we whip them out to see what popped up. Were we tagged in a Facebook post? Did someone send us a pic or video? While the world is already small in a sense, it has become much smaller now that we have condensed our living in to a tiny screen.

I've decided to take some time away from the phone and get out and do things. I'm going to do a social media "cleanse" for one week and I'll journal my observations. It's time to put aside the electronics and really start living again.

Mia Baker