A never ending draw to just open the app, just click the icon, or refresh the page for the tenth time in an hour. Despite knowing that no one has posted anything, there’s still the subconscious draw to constantly check your social media profiles. At what sacrifice though? Interpersonal social skills, that’s the cost of all this technology. With every new “friend,” every like, every post, we become further disconnected from the world and people around us. While we become more and more addicted to social media sites, we become less and less interactive with the reality around us. How often do you instinctively pull out your phone in public just to avoid the awkward silence? What ever happened to talking to people in real life, not just texting
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Every generation -- until now -- grew up playing outside, learning life lessons from scraping their knees or banging their head. Of course we cried some, but we put a Band-Aid on and went right back out. Now kids cry when their app crashes. The time of the iPad, iPhone, iPod have made kids much more dependent. Visit a park and no longer will you see thirty kids running around pretending they’re cowboys or pirates. Instead there’s thirty children sitting on benches staring at a screen, oblivious to the outside world. When did parents become incapable of entertaining their kids without an iPad? When was the last time you saw a five year old without a piece of technology. Better question, when did five year olds start deserving iPhones? At 11 years old I got my first phone: a flip-up Motorola Razor. I could only call five people --not even text-- yet I thought I had the coolest thing on Earth. My 11 year old little brother’s first phone? An iPhone 6 with TouchID and 4GB of cellular data. How have we allowed this to become the norm? The average American now spends almost six hours a day on their phone; that translates into almost 25% of our entire life spent looking down at a dumb phone screen. Is that really what we want our memories to be made of? “Remember that one Youtube video I showed you?” Instead of “remember that overnight road-trip to Vegas?” All I do know is that when I’m on my deathbed, I don’t want to reflect on my life and only remember my
Every generation -- until now -- grew up playing outside, learning life lessons from scraping their knees or banging their head. Of course we cried some, but we put a Band-Aid on and went right back out. Now kids cry when their app crashes. The time of the iPad, iPhone, iPod have made kids much more dependent. Visit a park and no longer will you see thirty kids running around pretending they’re cowboys or pirates. Instead there’s thirty children sitting on benches staring at a screen, oblivious to the outside world. When did parents become incapable of entertaining their kids without an iPad? When was the last time you saw a five year old without a piece of technology. Better question, when did five year olds start deserving iPhones? At 11 years old I got my first phone: a flip-up Motorola Razor. I could only call five people --not even text-- yet I thought I had the coolest thing on Earth. My 11 year old little brother’s first phone? An iPhone 6 with TouchID and 4GB of cellular data. How have we allowed this to become the norm? The average American now spends almost six hours a day on their phone; that translates into almost 25% of our entire life spent looking down at a dumb phone screen. Is that really what we want our memories to be made of? “Remember that one Youtube video I showed you?” Instead of “remember that overnight road-trip to Vegas?” All I do know is that when I’m on my deathbed, I don’t want to reflect on my life and only remember my