Being a typical father of teenagers in the 21st century, I am used to trying to recall how days were spent, prior to the advent of smartphones. How did people get through each day without pressing the “Like” button on “selfie” pictures, and texting each other frequently like the way it is today?
I personally have experienced those days prior, and to my observation, today it almost seems as if people are unable to go on functioning without having to have a constant hold onto and looking at their smartphones; I have seen some people practise this habit whilst driving on the road and walking through a crowded mall. This poses a real danger to their own safety as well as other people’s safety.
Being a writer, I prefer to be objective about matters, and I refuse to fall into the familiar well of criticism against social media and the world’s unhealthy reliance on it, without first considering the plus-sides. I found that there is little wonder as to the extreme dependence and obsession with smartphones, seeing as smartphones were in fact created to make many things easier to perform, and to bring entertainment.
Smartphones can help you with directions, enable you to purchase, listen to, and even identify music and can also be used as powerful cameras or television sets that can receive anything from the local news to foreign shows.
As aforementioned, there are quite obviously a number of minus-factors when it comes to a smartphone, but the problem lies with the use of the phone rather than the smartphone itself.
Just like drugs, the mistake is made in the abuse of it. One particularly disturbing result from the abuse of smartphones would be the long hours wasted on a screen. There are the lengthy, yet essentially meaningless chats (of course, one may also have important, philosophical chats on a smartphone, but unfortunately on the whole, there is more of the empty variety), the gaming and the idle browsing of random photos and snippets of information that may not ultimately affect or even be relevant to one at the end of the day.
In the earlier days, having landline phones in our homes was a status symbol. But be that as it may, for a youngster to spend hours dangling on the phone was strictly disallowed. If you were not deemed old enough, private talk could hardly pass without parental interrogation.
But today, for various reasons, control of the phone is no longer with the parents, and now parents may find it near-impossible to keep track of the communications between their children and other – possibly dangerous – people.
But as I had said before, I must also weigh the good against the bad. The practice in making calls to foreign countries, for example, was close to non-existent; instead, letters were more common, and it would take long periods of waiting before a reply is received, if ever.
With the creation of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms, we are now able to discover and befriend people from all over the world, besides maintaining contact with loved ones.
It must be kept in mind that much of the barrage of negative comments on social media, was in fact made on social media. Regardless of age or generation gaps, we have witnessed the world shrink in distance, and if a measure of self-discipline is adopted, perhaps we may also focus some of the focus put into levelling up on Candy Crush into real-life advancement.
