Thomas Rollins: Do Smartphones Have a Negative Impact on Social Interaction?

Round Table Assignment Ms. Eaker- English 1102

Smartphones are something nowadays that is almost a standard device. It is hard to find a

phone that only makes calls and receives texts because smartphones have become so easily attainable. The ability to access the internet and play games and communicate more than ever is a remarkable thing, but I wonder sometimes, are they a little too good for us? Many people I see walk and look at their smartphone, eat with their smartphone on the table, use it in class, and communicate with others even when they are with their friends, so why are we so addicted and fascinated by the ability to communicate whenever we want? More importantly to me though, are smartphones detrimental to our social and educational well-being? It is a question I have asked myself many times when I see someone who is on their smartphone while their friend is talking to them, or when they are so wrapped up in their device they hardly know what is going on around them. I couldnt help but think that smartphones abilities must come at a price. They are distracting and create addictive behaviors from what I have seen, but that is just what I have taken from my 1st hand observations. For this inquiry, I conducted research to find a conclusion to my question I have had for so long. There are several similar perspectives or voices that I have found to be quite informative and eye opening through personal testament in full-time working college graduates, education, and scientific research. Hopefully the voices I have found can inform you about my original query, and can enlighten you in a part of modern life that you may not have thought about in-depth beforehand. Smartphones are incredible devices. 15 years ago a computer was a cumbersome device that sat on a desk at work, or a personal office and was used there. They were big and slow, and at the time, an innovative marvel to many individuals. Now we have advanced computers in the palm of our hands that are exponentially faster than that of the cumbersome desktops over a decade ago. Now that we have access to email, and texting, along with (of course) the ability to make phone calls, work is always able to catch you even if you are not at the office. From a few specific sources I got an idea of how smartphones can steal fleeting moments of your life. As a matter of fact, that is the title of the article by Jason Perlow, a senior technology editor at ZDNet , who has decades of experience with merging multi-vendor software systems in fortune 500 companies. He is currently employed by Microsoft Corporation. Perlows job requires constant attention and the smartphone has been able to give him the ability to be updated on what he is concerned with and any other issues that could possibly cause problems at work. Working for Microsoft, a highly reputable company has got to be very mentally taxing, but he addresses the fact that, even though he works high in rank for a fortune 500 company, and he has a smartphone to keep him updated, he has become aware that his smartphone has taken away some events in

his life that he wish he had back. One example he gives is when he and his wife were visiting Montreals Museum of Fine Arts, but even though he was surrounded by these incredible artist like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, he could not, and did not enjoy it because he was reading up on details from work and engaged in his smartphone, oblivious to the moment he could be enjoying. In continuance of the voices from full-time employees, Charlene deGuzman created a comedy skit on YouTube that has gotten several million views. It portrays a couple, by appearance I would say right out of college, and it documents the daily activity of this age group and their interaction with their smartphones. Originally intended to be for pure comedy, the skit is actually disturbing in a way, because the actions by the people portrayed in the video are not all that inaccurate from many people we witness on a daily basis with their smartphones. Just like Perlow from the previous paragraph, was sitting in the Museum of Fine Arts while on his phone not paying any attention to the greatness around him, the video deGuzman has made, shows the couple, and their friends at a table in a restaurant sitting together, but not interacting with each other, rather they are all on their smartphones talking with others who werent present rather than enjoying each others company. The article found was by Nick Bilton, a writer for the New York Times. He saw the clip, shortly after it was released, and something about it made him want to address the video in depth and make it evident that the video clip was accurate in some ways to how those who have full-time jobs, or have many friends to communicate with in the age group of the video (early twenties), interact today and how smartphones can distract us from living in the moment. deGuzman in an interview with Bilton, stated that, like it or not, experiencing life through a four inch screen could become the new norm (Bilton). These sources by Perlow and Bilton were some of the first I had found, and helped me establish, an idea of what other perspectives had to say about smartphone usage and how it can be overwhelming. At another angle of research I had come across, had to deal with education, and the implications smartphone use could have on educators and the students they educated. In the Digital Divide by Mark Bauerlin, he discusses that the students of today arent what they used to be, and that the students that are being educated are no longer the students our educational system was designed to teach. Along with this voice, Yu-Kang Lee and Chun-Tuan Chang, are authors of an article I found from the schools database entitled The Dark Side of Smartphone Usage. I found that the ability for people who have smartphones to constantly send and receive multiple forms of messages, and the games they can play that yield immediate gratification, can take a toll on the ability for people to focus on one topic at a time, because they are so used to being able to have multiple things they want, when they want. In this view, the article explains that constantly checking your smartphone for updates, messages, and notifications can create compulsive habits that can be damaging to a persons ability to focus on class subjects at hand. A first-hand account of education, and overreliance on technology and smartphones comes from a source I collected by George Miller, and Carolina Molina-Ray. Miller begins his article by

describing his situation at a grocery store when the power went out. The lack of power had rendered the cashier unable to make and receive change. The constant reliance for people on their smartphones to answer questions for them and be a reservoir for information has made our mind lazy, because we dont have to remember information, if we want to know, we have access to the information at the touch of a finger on our smartphone. A huge voice that resonated with me, and was a huge aspect to my paper and the question I wanted answered came from the scientific research voices I had collected. The statistics are what fascinated me, and gave me the deepest understanding to my question. I was able to obtain two sources that had a significant amount of data. One came from an article published by Headline Science titled Time to Dial Back Smartphone Usage. Computer scientist from Bonn University had created an application called Menthol, that measured frequency of smartphone usage among participants, and the amount of time spent on their smartphones. The data was that every 12 minutes someone looked at their smartphone or accessed it. Another source I found by News Daily called How Smartphones are on the Verge of Taking Over the World. In this article New Relic, a software engineering firm, created software of their own to monitor smartphone usage. The data they collected by their application concluded that the average smartphone user checked their phone 150 times, per day. When they calculated that into the average amount of time a person spends awake, they found that that is approximately every 6 minutes. Both sources did give me different figures, however both data collected by each source was astonishing no matter which source you focused on. With these voices and perspectives given by all of the sources I collected, I got a much better idea of the impact smartphones have on our psychological, social, and educational behavior. It started out as just a question that I had asked myself many a time. Do smartphones have a negative impact on social and psychological behavior? To this question I concluded that yes, they do. You can argue that they make people more productive and that they have enabled us to communicate in ways we have never been able to. I have collected one source that supports smartphone use and its productivity, the other eight, have information that is negative towards the use of smartphones. This being the case, I think smartphones in the hands of certain individuals can be harmful, especially those who have little control of will power. These three voices I have found in my sources have certainly made an impression on me, and have helped answer my question.

Citations
Lee, Yu-Kang, and Chun Tuan-Chang et al. "The Dark Side Of Smartphone Usage: Psychological Traits, Compulsive Behavior And Technostress." Computers In Human Behavior 31.(2014): 373-383. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 Feb. 2014. Bauerlin, Mark. The Digital Divide. Arguments for and against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the age of social networking. Eds. Steven Johnson, Nicholas Carr, Don Tapscott, Douglas Rushkoff, Maggie Jackson, Clay Shirky, and Todd Gitlin Penguin Group Inc. New York, New York, 2011. 17. Print. Miller, George P., and Caroline Molina-Ray. Beyond Technology Dependence : Critically Reflexive Thinking Higher Education. Journal of Leadership studies 4.1(2010):74-76. Web. 31 January 2014 Headline Science Science Teacher. Time to Dial Back Smartphone Use? March 2013, Vol. 81 issue 3, p.16. Bonn University Perlow, Jason. How Smartphones Steal Fleeting Moments of Life. ZDNet. ZDNet, 5 Sept. 2013. Web. 20. March. 2014. Bilton, Nick. Disruption: More Connected, Yet More Alone. Bits Disruptions More Connected Yet More Alone Comments. The New York Times, 1 Sept. 2013. Web. 20. March. 2014 News, Daily. How Smartphones Are on the Verge of Taking Over the World. NY Daily News. New York Daily News, 22 March. 2013. Web. 20 Mar. 2014 Kalkbrenner, Joseph, and Atefeh McCampbell. "The Advent of Smartphones: A Study on the Effect of Handheld Electronics on Personal and Professional Productivity." Journal of Applied Global Research 4.8 (2011): 1-9. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.