Growing up in the digital era, where everything is so easily accessible and automatic sometimes makes me wonder how things were for my peers in the past. A very interesting article in the Seventeen magazine lists that people met each other to share the latest news or discuss their social lives. Nowadays, I feel like the latter term is replaced with social media lives. Multitudinous platforms where people share multimedia or text messages have suffocated the “art” of conversation. I call it “art” because today people do struggle to have a decent conversation. The sole problem is that they do not know how to! Being used to sending numerous text messages, they have mastered the ability to edit themselves and having time to think before they state anything.
I declare myself as part of this category. One of my previous employers once told me that one of the reasons she hired me was due to the excellent communication skills I demonstrated in my e-mails. Not earlier than this week, I had my first mock interview with my college’s career advisor. It did not go well at all! I was struggling to answer precisely to his questions because I did not have my smartphone in my hands, where I am used to slowly write my ideas, re-read and finally edit them. This makes me realize that our smartphones have a psychological power that changes us. They supply us with virtual perfection but decrease our real-life skills.
Technology and smartphones seem to have affected the social life of almost every teenager. Whenever I have friends sleeping over, they ask to sleep on the side where the plug is, because they need the phone charging next to them, even when they are asleep! We start and end the day with our phones, that we somehow have become lonelier. We find joy in sending “xoxo” via text messages when the real pleasure lies in physical contact. “The dopamine released during a kiss stimulates the area of the brain activated by heroin and cocaine.” - writes Emel Maguire for the British Council. If sex was the climax of mutual feelings between two people, now teenagers prefer sexting, where they exchange nude pictures of each other and explain what they would like to do to each other, rather than meet and do it.
Another article in The Independent found a connection between the decline in the number of teenage drug users and the increase in smartphone activity. Teenagers have turned their attention to smartphones because they get the same adrenaline and satisfaction as with drugs. This shows that they are both addictive, but smartphones are a better value for money and last longer. However, this is a limited conclusion since teenagers still gather in house parties, with their phones and drugs together. Sometimes they even share them on Instagram for limited viewers (e.g. close friends).
I believe that smartphones have made us less skilled in the real world and much lonelier. Smartphones have changed the teenagers’ behavior starting from the core of communication, which is the proper way of writing the language. We shorten words just like we shorten our interaction with each other, forgetting that technology does not empathize in any case. People who would use drugs back then were also the ones who had problems in socializing. The addiction between phones and drugs is the same. Reaching for the phone has now become an instinct, a nervous tic that needs a cure before we let ourselves merge with a senseless piece of technology.
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