Our cellphones disconnect us from reality

Photo by Adam Fagen via Flickr

Yiana Ramaj | Contributing Writer

opinion@fiusm.com

In the fast growing world of new technologies, we have made many changes in the ways we live our lives. Family dinners have now become a fight against everyone’s smartphone, meeting your next lover is no longer at chance when meeting someone on the street and reuniting with distant friends from the past is a common occurrence with the help of social media sites. With each amenity we gain by the help of the Internet, we are also losing the power to physically communicate, while in other cases it is connecting our world in a way that was never before possible.

Back when cell phones didn’t exist and the Internet was barely in use, people relied on the radio and newspapers to catch up on current events. Now every piece of information we could possibly want to know is at the mercy of our fingertips.

The problem we face is that we spend so much time looking down at our phones that we forget about the real world around us. Think about how many times you have walked a block down the street with your face buried into your texts and ran into another person.

Or when you sit down for lunch with your friends and you go to check a text and ten minutes later when you look back up, everyone else is too caught up in their own cyber world to start a real conversation. We are all guilty of this, but the disease of the Internet has become an ongoing issue with the way we communicate in real life.

On the other hand, we are able to immediately find out what is going on in our world with a click of a button. When signing onto Facebook we are bombarded with news articles and celebrity gossip that flood our news feed. Everybody rages about their thoughts on these topics giving us a more broad view on the issues going on instead of only hearing family and friends’ biased opinions. We have never been more in tune to the ever-changing world we live in.

With all things considered, we don’t want to be known as the generation that is so lost in our mobile devices that we missed out on life itself. There are so many advantages to the advancements in technology, but we all need to learn how to step outside without our cell phones glued to our sides. Challenge yourself to turning your phone off while at dinner and keeping your phone in your pocket while walking down the street. You might be surprised at the engaging conversations and increased coherence that is put in your path.