The telephone has it's issues, but many of which were later solved with the introduction of the cell phone. It was suddenly possible to live at all times without ever being unreachable. You could be anywhere in the world and connect with anyone else, at any given time.
Today, in the U.S alone, 278.9 million people subscribe to a cell phone service. By comparison, there are 309 million people alive in the U.S according the 2000 census data.
Now that cell phone have become so unanimous, their implications have become more and more wide-spread. Check out our Prezi for the details:
Cellphones and their effects on human development. on Prezi
There are several ways this influences out lives and well-beings. For one thing, the World Health Organization now believes that there may be a link to cell phones and brain cancer. (Though their research may be flawed...)
Not to mention, I would personally trade a slightly increased risk of brain cancer for constantly available 911 access.
Something else to think about, a person's cell phone is always in reach. It has become impossible to escape our friends, family, or the entire world. With the internet connectivity they offer, Google, Facebook, MySpace (if you still use that, get with the times), eBay, and every other notable web service sit right in your pocket, just waiting for the urge to hit you to browse, surf, and communicate.
The cellphone brings lots of positives and negative to the table, but let's be honest, even if they shorten our live expectancies, cell phones aren't going anywhere.
In “Alone Together,” Sherry Turkle writes about our increasing dependency on technology and decreasing connections with each other. She spends the majority of Chapters 8 and 9 discussing the role technology now has in our lives, especially due to cell phones. She recalls watching her daughter slowly slip under the spell of technology and eventually confesses her own connection. I believe that a cell phone’s purpose should be to provide mobile phone calls, nothing more. Text messages have dissolved and replaced our face-to-face interactions, tethering us to the small screen that encompasses our private world. It will be an extremely difficult task, but we need to reverse the curse that convenience has placed on us, in favor of the companionship that enlivens us.
ReplyDeleteFirst, kudos for taking on such a topic.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Tyler in that I think cell phones are being used for too much nowadays. My phone can only call and text, and I don't want it to do anything else. In Carr's book "The Shallows," page 120, he says:
"Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don't fire together don't wire together...as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs...the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart."
True as that may be, I would like to point out that communication is communication, regardless of the medium. I think cell phones have drastically increased interpersonal relationships and worldwide communication, and that any trade-offs with networks in the brain are made up for with networks around the world.
In Angry Birds news, there's this:
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/tkEwcjxC6i8
Essentially, NASA is promoting the newest version of Angry Birds, which I think is pretty cool, as far as the reach of mobile gaming.
Jocelyn is right about her point that "communication is communication" through things like texting and Twitter, our generation is getting really good at putting together short, concise messages. I personally don't even speak on the phone anymore, unless I'm calling tech support or ordering takeout... or communicating with my father, because he refuses to accept texting as a form of communication. Talking on the phone takes longer and if the person receiving the call is unavailable at that moment, you get put on the spot to leave an awkward voicemail or call again. Texting allows each participant time to respond whenever they get the time to and also the time to consider how to compose that message.
The modern cell phone is just a beautiful thing for communication, allowing it to occur whenever, wherever.
Tyler's comment is artfully written and quite convincing. But I would go one step further. If we need to reverse the use of text messaging to promote intimate communications, why not get rid of phones entirely? After all, face to face is supposed to be the best way to communicate. Why not force people to travel to each other in order to have a conversation? Because it is inconvenient and unnecessary. I can see the decline in person to person communication skills, but it is an inevitability in the progression of our society. Perhaps communication as we know it will become obsolete as we communicate more and more via text messaging and email, and even this blog.
Also, there's this, a cell phone app that supposedly can diagnose depression based on the user's habits and give them suggestions on how to be more active.
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/oFiPPzUKj4o
Mandy mentioned that texting gives you time to carefully compose your message before you send it, and I think that this brings up an excellent point about the differences between texting and face-to-face communication. While the time barrier between texts does allow for more carefully considered comments in a conversation, I think that it also potentially causes some problems. I truly believe that people can get used to this barrier that cell phones provide, and consequently have trouble keeping up in a real conversation. In other words, I think people can become familiar with technology at the expense of some social skills.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this problem does not exist in everyone, and it's not unsolvable. As Mitchell suggested, cell phones are not going away any time soon, no matter what downsides they may have. And so, I would suggest examining yourself. If you find that you are becoming awkward because you spend too much time texting, then give it a rest and intentionally seek meaningful face-to-face conversations. I don't think that we need to get rid of cell phones to have enlivening companionship; there is a middle ground to be found. Cell phones were made for our benefit, so only use them as much as is beneficial to you. Let the wonderful convenience of a cell phone supplement your life, but do not be confined by its limitations. First seek to develop yourself and those important, defining relationships in your life with meaningful interaction. If you do that, then it really doesn't matter how you use your phone.
Even texting can have it's benefits though. Some studies have found that the constant texting we do is actually causing our writing skills to greatly improve, because we are starting to rely more and more on written communication. Plus, as keyboards have gotten better, we don't need to use the annoying sms shorthands that have popped up over the past few years. Sure, everyone uses "lol", but at least most people take the extra millisecond to fully type out "you."
ReplyDeleteMitchell's right, most of the abbreviations that people use now are to represent emotion, like "lol" and emoticons and such, which add to the depth of the message. I also tend to ignore the rules of capitalization, but to quote New York Times bestselling author John Green, "I only get annoyed when people use grammar as a way of humiliating other people in YouTube comments, rather than using grammar for what it's supposed to be used for, which is to make language as clear and intelligible as possible." And on that note, Mitchell, "Even texting can have its benefits though." No apostrophe.
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