In 2018, the world has made some pretty impressive technological advancements. 20 years ago, The idea of a phone being more than a phone was bizarre. Now, the world biggest companies are making smartphones that are more powerful than a gaming console (which is very powerful because it needs to run heavy games) and have better cameras than ever before, shooting at 4k 60fps. The smartphone is a very helpful tool. However as Uncle Ben once told Peter Parker from spiderman, “Great power comes with great responsibility”. We as people have been given an extraordinary tool that gives humans the power of an intellectual powerhouse. However, most people don’t use their phones responsibly.
The phone has great potential. It makes it possible to communicate across the world. You can even have a private conversation with someone in public. However, people overuse this superpower. It has come to the point where some people end up texting each other even when they are sitting at the same table. The cellphone has some great connective power, but this connective power can also serve as an insulator to humanity. If you sit down at the dinner table to eat dinner and pull out your phone, you have the ability to find out what is going on halfway across the world but you start to miss out on what is happening right in front of you. We start to lose ourselves to our own creations.
Our cellphones are so great, that we start to believe in the power of our phones, more than our own brains. When some people are faced with a question that they don’t know the immediate answer, the first instinct is to pull out your phone. “How many states surround Pennsylvania?” or “what is 256GB in Bytes?” or even “How much is 2 meters in feet?” these questions are most likely going to make people pull out their phones and google the definition. In fact, “googling” became a verb in recent years. When people learn something new off the internet, some people don’t try to remember it because they know that they can just google it when they need the information.
People have actually gotten less smart because they rely on their phones for so much information, that information comes straight from google to your voice. It has been scientifically proven that over usage of a cell phone leads to less brain development and not much neural pathway development. Instead, you are just strengthening the one neural pathway to open your phone and do something. Some people end up just opening their phone, and don’t really do anything. They wander their apps looking for something to do, or they open instagram and just look around for a bit, but they have no real motive.
Some people may take this information in the wrong way and decide that the phone is an evil tool that is destroying humanity with every smartphone. However, if people learn how to tame their phones, then Humans as a whole can fix what mess that we dropped into. If people start to understand their responsibility as a smartphone user and actually act upon it, then people, together with smartphones, can help improve the human society. One realization at a time.
Good work by Pranav Polakam. Just wanted to share...
ReplyDelete