Our phones go everywhere with us. From the moment we wake up to the seconds before we go to sleep, these little supercomputers are the only things we keep with us all day. But while they’re entertaining and useful in a number of ways, there should be a time and place where we put down our phones.
Mobile phones’ endless options understandably make them hard to put down. From social media to games and everything in between, phones can honestly do too much. Because of the endless options, we spend an average of 2 hours and 57 minutes on our phones per day while the old average for TV usage was 2 hours and 48 minutes, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that statistic shot up very fast, very recently.
As early as 2012, the daily usage of mobile phones was only 109 minutes. That has increased by an hour in less than 3 years. What caused the dramatic inflection?
Well the increase in app time almost solely can be blamed. In just the past ten months app time increased by almost 10 percent according to the BLS. There are more apps than people know what to do with, but let us think about phone usage in another way.
The time spent on smartphones shot up by more than an hour in less than three years, which also means the time spent doing other things has decreased by more than an hour in less than three years.
Understandably, it’s not an exact swap. Some of things we previously did on other platforms are now available on our phones, so the swap is incidental. We check email more often on our phones now, we can keep up with our bank balance and transfer money and we can browse the internet seamlessly because websites are required to have a mobile version. Therefore, the swap is almost meaningless and just a swap from one screen to another, but some of that time is still being taken away from other areas.
We spend less time exercising, less time sleeping, less time doing work and most importantly less time with our phone down. We’ve become too attached and it has consequences that we can’t fully understand yet.
What is going to happen to the communication skills of the generations who grow up with a phone in their diaper? How will all this screen time affect them? We can’t say, because it’s impossible to know. Only time will tell. The grammar and writing skills of our generation have already been shown to be negatively affected by all the tweets, texts and posts.
The funny thing is, we look forward to vacations where we can put the phone down. A vacation on an island or a camping trip in the forest. Some place where Wi-Fi or data doesn’t exist. Somewhere to regain some bearing and get a hold of yourself.
But why does it take some secluded area to put our phones down? We might not be able to spare an entire day, but start with a couple hours. The most important place we can start is when we’re with friends.
Good relationships take attention and effort, so stop wasting the time and effort on reddit or Instagram. Instead of learning some meaningless junk from people across the country posting about their cat, learn something about the families of the friends sitting across from you. It will benefit you and those around you in more ways than one.
