WHAT was the longest time that you had been away from your phone? Do you feel uneasy for the fact that you haven’t been staring at your phone’s screen for the past two hours?
In this day and age, people like us tend to spend our time scrolling past our phone’s screen repeatedly; watching at endless streams of videos, reading, or even playing for hours. It is no longer surprising that we spend most of our days with our faces hooked to the gadget’s tiny screen.
However, with today’s advancement of technology and the wonders that it brings, how much are we actually missing out from the reality around us and from the life that actually happens outside when we would rather be at our phones?
At our homes, we cannot deny the fact that we find ourselves tinkering with our phones more than we talk with our family.
I, myself, can confess to this and I find myself thinking that I could talk to them while simultaneously being at my phone.
But here is the catch: we cannot be doing both things at a time that requires our presence not only physically but also mentally.
Think of a scenario where you are with your friends sitting together in a table and all attentions are at one’s own phones barely even looking up to talk. It is a simple scenario that we usually overlook since we have gotten used to it already.
In an article published on The Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk), “people are on average online for 24 hours a week, twice as long as 10 years ago, with one in five of all adults spending as much as 40 hours a week on the web.” The same report also revealed that adults would check their phones within five minutes upon waking up; others would also peek at their phones immediately after turning their lights out to sleep.
These are not just numbers presented by the survey but the actuality of the life we have whenever we start up the screens of our phones and only to find out that we had already missed face-to-face conversations and miss out from the reality. Well it may be true that using our smartphones has already become a great part of our everyday life, we must not forget that we still have to participate in real life situations with real life people. (Alyzza Jean Mundog, UM intern)