The Positive And Negative Effects Of Cell Phones On College Students

Next time you go out to dinner take a second and look around. You’ll see the same thing I see when I go to the cafeteria here at Wingate University. As I sit and eat my meal, I notice that every group, including my own, has one thing in common at least one of its members is looking at their cell phone. Even the people I sit with, myself included are guilty of picking up our cell phones. Some people will pick up their phones, without having a notification; they scroll through their social media while conversing with their peers. This causes their attention to be split, with most of their focus being on what is on their screen. This leads me to believe that, while they are convenient, cell phones have negative effects on the ways humans interact with each other. In the article “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.” Sherry Turkle, an MIT pyshcologist, describes the rules that college students have explain to her over the course of her research. They tell her of the “rule of three.” The “rule of three” states that if a conversation includes five or six people, at least three people must be paying attention at one time (Turkle). This rule shows that students have begun to see conversation with their peers as something they have to do …show more content…
Young adults can no longer be satisfied with one thing. They are used to constantly switching from one app, one message, or from one website to another. This decrease has become a major issue when dealing with what is described in “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk” as the “seven-minute rule.” The rule is centered around the idea that, “it takes at least seven minutes to see how a conversation is going to unfold” (Turkle). During the first seven-minutes of a conversation, according to the rule, you are not allowed to look at your phone. Since they are used to the fast pace of their cellphones, these seven minutes can feel like forever; especially if silence