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[/media-credit]Our society is booming with technology – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and texting. These things are decreasing the everyday face–to–face interactions people have with one another. An article on iowastatedailey.com by Bailey McGrath states: Results of data collected by the Android app Locket show that the average person checks his or her phone 110 times a day, with the highest frequency user checking the phone up to 900 times daily.
This data is unbelievable, yet, it is what our society is coming to. When interviewing teenage students, I received similar responses on this topic of technology. Primarily, most spoke of the annoyance of having friends who are addicted to cell phones.
One student said, “I hate when I’m trying to talk to my friend and they’re too busy tweeting or instagramming.”
“When I wanted to tell a certain friend about my day, she was always on her phone, laptop, or watching television. I felt really lonely because it seemed like I had no one to talk to,” said another student.
Sherry Turkle gave a great TED talk in 2012 on technology. She stated, “The feeling of ‘no one is listening to me’ is very important in our relationships with technology. That is why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or Twitter feed because it allows you to have automatic listeners. The feeling of ‘no one is listening to me’ makes us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.”
Technology is not only targeting teenagers, but adults have also caught the wave of technology addiction. This was confirmed to me one night when I was at a restaurant with my family. As the waiter was showing us to our table, we walked past an elderly couple eating dinner together. I noticed that they both had their iPads out and were not even talking to each other. Each was denying their full attention to the other because they felt that the app on their iPad was more interesting.
At the end of Bailey McGrath’s article entitled “Technology Ruining Social Interaction” he challenges the reader to do the following: “turn your phone on silent and not check it while out to dinner with friends; go to a concert and keep your phone in your pocket or purse and let yourself just fully live in that moment; take pictures from your evening, but not take any precious time from the night to post them and do it in the morning when you’re alone; hang out with your family or friends for a night without checking your phone. I challenge you to give the people you’re with one-hundred percent of your attention and see how positively that can change your interaction with them.”
Rebekah Hansen
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