For your own good, put down the phone
A Facebook post over the weekend caught our attention and caused us to think anew about the effects of the explosion of smartphone use on our society.
The post in question, from a local resident, recounted an incident during a trip to the theater. As the house lights were going down after an intermission, a woman was still pecking away at her “giant, glowing cellphone.” That didn’t sit well with a man behind her, who batted her in the noggin with his program and implored her to “Turn it off!” The woman just lowered the phone into her lap and typed a while longer before finally shutting it down.
Now, we don’t condone violence, even of the relatively minor whacking-with-paper variety, but we understand the feelings of the male theatergoer.
Smartphones have long been ubiquitous, but what they have wrought seems to be getting worse, if that’s possible.
The next time you’re in a restaurant, take a look around. It’s almost a guarantee that you’ll see people in every corner of the eatery gazing at their phone screens, ignoring the people with whom they are dining. Sometimes you’ll see couples, each with his or her own phone, choosing cat photos or text messaging with someone not in the restaurant over interaction with the person across the table from them.
We can be certain that this behavior translates to the home, as well. How many of you sit in the living room at night with your significant other, supposedly watching TV together, but instead you’re ignoring the show and one another in favor of noodling on the phone?
Also keep an eye out the next time you’re watching a televised sporting event. When they put up a shot of the crowd, there no doubt will be a sprinkling of folks who are not watching the action on the field or diamond or rink, but are gawking at their little shining screens. Some of them, instead of watching the game, are trying to take photos of themselves, or attempting to take pictures of the action, rather than just taking in the game. Do they worry about missing something important in the contest? Probably not. There’s always instant replay on the Jumbotron.
If you really want to see smartphone addiction at its peak, camp out near an academic building on one of our area college campuses and wait until a class lets out. There will be a veritable parade of students streaming from the building, heads down, eyes locked on their phones. It’s amazing that more of them don’t just wander into traffic. If the good Lord, himself, parted the clouds and floated down to earth right in front of them, many of these kids wouldn’t know a thing about it until it showed up in their Instragram feeds.
As noted in the above-mentioned theater incident, cellphones have become major irritants in venues where once the most offensive and annoying behavior was someone munching popcorn too loudly. Nobody is going to complain if someone has his or her phone out on the lawn at Star Lake among thousands of rowdy concertgoers, but it’s highly inappropriate in a dark movie theater or a more intimate concert setting. And the people who think it’s OK to piddle around on their phones in these venues don’t even seem to recognize that what they are doing is offensive to those surrounding them. Our thought is this: If you can’t bear to spend a couple of hours detached from your phone, or if you have pressing issues to which you must attend, just stay home.
The worst thing about these technological marvels – and smartphones do have many valuable and amazing applications – is that they keep us from actually interacting with our friends and family members and those we encounter in our daily travels. That’s the real loss.
Smartphones put a world’s worth of information at our fingertips, but they also make us dummies.