Looking at the world through a cell phone

By Linnea Cavallo (Whetstone staff)

Linnea Cavallo       Melissa Boyd / Whetstone

On average, 88 texts are sent and received each day.

In one day, people tweet about 55 million times; 41% of these tweets come from cell phones.

Instagram, an application only used on cell phones, gains a new user every second. About 58 photos are uploaded each second using this app.

Facebook users spends about 700 billion minutes per month using the site. What’s even sadder is that 48 percent of users check their Facebook pages before they even get out of bed; 350 million of Facebook’s users log in using their cell phones.

The amount of time people spend on their cell phones is scary. Are these people getting the most out of life? Are they getting the full experience of an event, or are they too busy worrying about who’s going to get their picture uploaded to Instagram first, or who is going to tweet that funny thing a friend just said?

“For whatever reason, our generation is obsessed with every detail of other people’s lives but also sharing every detail of their own,” said Kaylee Miller, a student at Wesley. “People’s smart phones have become a comfort blanket, an addiction.”

Here’s an example:

While at Disney World over spring break, there was a group of girls ahead of us in line for the Tower of Terror. The group was posing for picture after picture: group shots, individual shots, and partner shots. After taking one of the group shots one of the girls yelled, “Hey, I want to be the first one to put this picture up on Instagram.”

After the girl finally got the perfect crop, filter and blur on her picture, she immediately told everyone to go on the photo sharing website to “like” her photo.

Meanwhile, while they were so worried about how many “likes” they were going to get, the group was missing out on some of the most interesting parts of the ride, including the scene-setting.

This same group led the way on the Star Wars ride. I loosely use the word “led,” since my group had to tell them when to move forward. The group was so involved on their cell phones that the line moved only until it got to this group of girls, and then it stopped.

Maybe having face-to-face conversations are too much for people that they can’t even listen when people are talking to them. It goes back to having basic manners that you learned as a child that unfortunately a lot of people have forgotten.

Listen and pay attention when someone is talking to you. Look in their eyes, acknowledge the individual talking.

Here’s another example: A friend of mine was eating lunch with two of her girlfriends. She started telling a story to her friends when halfway through she realized her friends were so into their phones that they hadn’t even realized that she had stopped telling the story. They were merely nodding their heads.

When she realized her friends weren’t talking any longer, she started to say that she was getting married and dropping out of school.

Still, no response from her friends. It wasn’t until she stopped talking completely that her friends finally noticed they weren’t paying attention.

“Wait, what did you just say, sorry,” they said.

When people are so dedicated to the conversations they are having over their phones, they lose the physical conversation happening in front of them. That communication is crucial.

Not only are you being rude and inconsiderate, but you are hurting a friend’s feelings. You are missing out on things going on around you.

“It really makes you feel badly about yourself when you realize your ‘friends’ would rather be texting, tweeting, or on Facebook, than listen to something that you have to say,” said senior Amanda Kerely. “It makes me feel less important and that hurts.”

There’s no possible way that constantly being on their phones can be healthy for our generation,” said Kaylee Miller. “People’s social aspect of their lives are the most affected by this obsession because not only are verbal conversations constantly interrupted or ignored but people spend more time focused on what’s going on in other people’s lives and keeping up with the social media than they are on their own lives in the present.”

A lot of people these days say you can’t get a decent job without a college degree. Therefore, for those lucky enough to go to school to receive a good education, don’t you think the student should be trying to get as much out of their classes as they can? One would think, but not for some of the people at Wesley.

On almost every single class syllabus the professor has in all capitals and bolded: “NO CELL PHONES ALLOWED”

Yet, many students refuse to follow this rule, even if the consequence of the rule is to be asked to leave the classroom. While sitting in class every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the same student who sits beside me is on his phone every class. Instead of taking notes on what the project is that we are supposed to be working on, he is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or just searching the Web. Not only is this distracting him from the class, but it distracts me and other students sitting around him.

Guess what? When it comes time for the project to be worked on, the student has no idea what he is doing. So, the person who was paying attention during class and taking notes – that is, me – then takes time out of working on her project to repeat the lecture the professor gave earlier that week. If you’re just going to play on your phone during class and not listen, why are students even paying the money to go to college?

When you look at the world through a cell phone you miss what is really going on in life around you. You’re missing the moments that you’ll never get back and replacing them with things that will always be on a memory card.