Take your time to think about what your smart phone means to you. Remember the time you left it at home on your kitchen table or on the sofa? The feeling of anxiety stroke you the moment you realized your mobile was not within reach. A wave of panic washed over you and made you drop whatever it was you were doing and rush home. If you stopped to think, you would not be in such a hurry. Now I will explain why.
The digital era we all live in has had a great impact on the quality of life. Various electronic devices have been invented and are constantly being upgraded and enhanced for the sake of a better and more convenient life. Yet, together with the good that technologies bring us, they pervert the image of intellectual activities. People start to forget what it is like to be free from all the devices and smart phones in particular. Any free minute is used to check e-mails or scroll through new posts in Instagram and other social networks. As I see it, if we continue using smart phones the way we do now, it will lead to rather dramatic consequences. In fact, I believe one can already see and experience the changes that are happening to us. Firstly, it is essential for people to socialize as it helps us acquire communication skills. It is especially crucial in childhood, the time of personality formation. Sadly, children started to replace real communication with virtual one. If children continue doing it, in the future there will be a lot of lonely people with corrupted or absent communication skills. I suppose, it sounds bad enough, but in some cases it could have an even more dramatic impact – crime rates could soar as some people will have mental disorders. Games that children and teenagers utilize as time killers will also contribute to the deformation the value system. Seeing game characters kill other people, steal things, use different weapon will make it normal for players in real life. Besides, there will be changes in the way a human’s brain works. It will be difficult for people to concentrate on the task they are doing. Numerous scientific studies conducted recently support the claim. For example, there has been a research about Instant Messaging (IMing) which proved that it interferes with other important activities and consequently a child’s distractibility increases. The result of it is poor academic performance. (Levine et al. 562). One would say, so what? There have always been children with bad marks. But what if it becomes global? For humanity it will mean a dramatic decrease in the number of professionals, because people will lose the ability to study. Furthermore, a realization of the fact that Google knows everything makes it unnecessary to memorize the information that our parents and grandparents had to learn. One no longer needs to hold everything in one’s memory since a smart phone has enough memory to hold it.
Thus, I have come to the question at the beginning of my blog. It is quite ironic to realize that the smart phones that people created will become smarter than people. Undoubtedly, there will still be responsible people who will understand what is right and what is wrong. Still, with the abundance of fools it will be difficult for them to influence the world and it can lead to very sad consequences.
Works cited
Levine, Laura E., Waite, Bradley M., and Bowman, Laura L. “Electronic Media Use, Reading, and Academic Distractibility in College Youth”. CyberPsychology & Behavior Aug. 2007: 560-566. Print.
