Alzewawi 1

Abdulrahman Alzewawi
English 113B
Professor Melissa Filbeck
25 September 2014
The innovation of Smart Phones
How smart phones do us more good than harm things? In fact, according to Nielsen
research, 55.5 percent of mobile phone subscribers in the United States own smartphones.
There are people who dont recommend using smart phones for several reasons. For example,
my father tells us to avoid using smart phones because he thinks that it is distracting us from
our studies. In the contrary, I see that smart phones help us in our studies either in searching
the web instantly to find a solution or in translating into my language especially when I am
studying abroad. People argue that smartphones cause us to waste time, distract us, make us
stupid and isolate us from others. There are different perspectives of using smart phones in
our world. It is important to use the smartphone correctly in order to extract the benefits from
it because if people use it in a wrong way, it will harm them instead of helping them.
However, the beneficial of smart phones including school uses, communicating with others,
and saving time. These beneficial outweigh any of the disadvantages.
Smart phones play an important rule in school uses in taking pictures, and recording
the lecture. Laura Clark states, Some high school students are putting their smartphones to
clever use, enhancing the classroom experience and propelling education into the 21st
century. In other words, Laura Clark believes that smartphones can be very helpful a lot in
school uses. Students can take pictures of the board, so the students can pay attention to the
class lecture instead of writing notes. It also helps to share the pictures with absent students.
Moreover, They can record the lecture and watch it again in their home to understand it
clearly. Likewise, teachers can benefit from smartphones by using the Response Ware app to

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ask students multiple-choice questions and the students can respond instantly. In addition,
students can download apps that help to access websites with one click which also save more
time.
Although there are a lot of researches that show that smartphones save our time, there
are some people argue that smartphones waste our time. Pope Francis urged 50,000 German
altar servers not to waste time on the Internet, smartphones and television, but to spend their
time on more productive activities. On the contrary, we actually can save our time by using
smartphones in checking the news all over the world not just a specific country instantly.
Moreover, we use the navigation to lead us to our road instead of getting lost and waste our
time. Furthermore, we can make reservation, check our bank statements or block our stolen
card instantly by them. Smartphones have an instant access to email, social media,
advertisements and news. Smartphone can be connected with a printer to print directly from
the phone rather than wasting our time in turning on the computer.
Communicating with others is the main purpose of using smart phones; however,
some people said it leads to isolation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology social
psychologist Sherry Turkle, PhD says people today are more connected to one another than
ever before in human history, thanks to Internet-based social networking sites and text
messaging. But theyre also more lonely and distant from one another in their unplugged
lives. In making this comment, Turkle indicates that people are more connected online and
less connected or gathered with each other in the society. I agree up to a point, I agree that it
makes us more connected online, but it doesnt make us less connected with each other. For
example, although I consider as an international student and the smartphones help me in
contacting my family or friends internationally or texting them by social media and
contacting my friends who are in the states by the same ways, I still get gathered with friends
daily even if I am contacting them online.

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Smartphones help us to remember things by putting notes in them and taking pictures.
Millie Ong is one of the people who disagrees with this statement in the article Smartphones
Are Ruining The Way We Remember and says maybe we shouldnt be given that privilege
if it means we forget to be in the moment and to take it for granted. The essence of Millies
argument is that every moment at this time is captured and thus we are depending on the
capture moment in remembering these moments. Humans cant remember everything at once,
so I think smartphones help us to remember moments and memorize things whether in taking
notes or taking pictures.
Some people have encouraged using smartphones for studying, while some have
argued that smartphones can distract us from their studies. According to Bob Sullivan,
Students can't concentrate on homework for more than two minutes without distracting
themselves by using smartphones. However, students can restrict themselves from using it
by putting it away if they are addicted to it. They also can change the sound mode to silent
mode in order to avoid distraction when they are studying. On the contrary, smartphones help
us instead of distract us by allowing us to search the web quickly in order to get a solution, to
understand a problem, or to research something. Moreover, they can be a tutor if we use them
to watch a tutorial video on Youtube or another website. Smartphones are able to translate
from a language to another language. They could be used as an calculator.
People agree that smartphones make us stupid, but they also agree that smartphones
make make us smarter ant the same time. In the article Are Smartphones Making us dumb,
according to Dr. Sandy Chapman, chief director for the Center for Brain Health in Dallas,
When people ask me the question, you know, 'What is our technology, our phones, doing?
Are they making us smarter or dumber?' I say, 'Yes, they are. They're making us smarter, and
they're making us dumber,' Dr. Chapmans point is that smartphones help us in saving
contacts phone numbers which allow our brain to think deeper without struggling with any

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memories of phone numbers. However, while they are buzzing, beeps or rings, they interrupt
our thinking and that the reason of being dumber. She mentioned also that using smartphones
a lot lead to forgetting things, unable to memorize, and unable to get focused. And the
solution to avoid these things is to keep our phone away while we are concentrating on our
studies and not only when we are studying, but also to get our brain relaxed from
smartphones. Humans created smartphones to be a complicated innovation to live easier and
in a simple way. Therefore, smartphones will not harm people or make them dumber if they
use it in a correct way and avoid using them excessively.
In conclusion, it seems that smartphones have a lot of benefits for us and there are
different perspectives toward them. Some people say that they waste our time, lead us to stay
lonely, interrupt our attention and make us dumber. On the other hand, we benefit from
smartphones in communicating with others, checking the news, putting important notes in the
phone, saving our time, using navigation, using social media, making reservations, checking
our emails and checking our bank statements. Smartphones are a complicated thing that
makes us live in a simple way. What I mean by that is that humans are the ones who created
the complicated thing that is smartphones to make their lives easier and simple. So I think the
main purpose of smartphones is to help humans not to make them stupid or harm them. The
usefulness of the smartphones depends on how they are used not on current studies or
researches. To summarize, our life is easy now with smartphones and it will be much easier
in the future.

Works Cited
Clark, Laura. 5 Good Ways to Use Smartphones. NBC News. NBC News, Web.

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25 July 2012.
Price, Michael. Alone in the Crowd. American psychological association. Web.
June 2011
Liffey, Kevin. Pope urges young people not to waste time on Internet and
smartphones. Kevin Liffey. Web. 5 Aug. 2014
Ong, Millie. Smartphones Are Ruining The Way We Remember. Millie Ong,
7 Feb. 2014
Sullivan, Bob. Students can't resist distraction for two minutes ... and neither can you.
Bob Sullivan. Web. 18 May
Dewberry, Deana. Are Smartphones Making us dumb? Deana Dewberry. Web.
10 Nov,2012