By Acadia Otlowski
Look up.
No, really.
Click the power button on that glowing little screen of yours and join the present.
Be it a cell phone, a laptop or a tablet, Americans spend far too much time caring about the things that are happening on their various devices. According to the PEW Internet Research Project, 90 percent of all American adults have a cell phone, as of January 2014. The study also revealed that 58 percent of American adults have a smartphone.
Most of the time, it isn’t even because we are having an actual conversation with someone who is elsewhere. Most people are just flicking their thumb, scrolling through some social media feed. The result: spending time reading about other people’s lives and missing critical moments in our own.
The cell phone usage epidemic has gotten so invasive that restaurants have begun to ask customers to please not use them. A New York City restaurant went viral a few months ago when it looked into complaints that the wait time for its restaurant was too long. The restaurant hired a company to look into the claim, and it found that it used to take about an hour for a restaurant to serve a meal, but now it takes closer to two. It compared 2014 to 2004 and came to the conclusion that cell phones were to blame. Cell phones slowed down the time it took to order and to eat.
But slow service is not the only result of heavy cell phone usage. At a restaurant, those tables where everyone is on their cell phones, a heavy silence usually prevails. What is worse is being that one person who is not on their cell phone. The one who is actually aware that no one is speaking.
Compare this to a table where no one is on their cell phones. This table is usually loud, the conversations are better. The same thing happens at parties. Good times do not happen when everyone is preoccupied with the words and pictures on their screens.
Some of the best times I have had occurred in places where cell phones were limited. Either charging the phone was inconvenient or impossible or the service was nonexistent or slow.
It is one of the reasons that I love traveling with groups overseas. Most of the time no one has data on their cell phones and it forces everyone to put down the technology and converse.
When the Journalism students went to France over the summer, the first place that we stayed had no Wi-Fi, so we were forced to be in the moment and talk to each other. It caused some of us to bond more than we normally would, because there were no little glowing screens as a distraction.
Cell phones have made us more social online and less so in person. They’re causing us to forget how to have a real-life conversation without answering three texts and checking our Twitter feed.
So, please, if you’re questioning whether maybe you should put the cell phone down for a moment, or even turn it off, do it. You will not regret it.