PLEASE SHARE nomophobia: the fear of being without a phone As the fall leaves float down and the sun breaks through the trees, we Tweet, Facebook, Instagram and Vine our lives— so much so that those social networking sites are verbs. We’ve lost the meaning of relationships, both romantic and friendship. You aren’t truly dating someone until it’s “Facebook official,” for all to see and “creep.” Coffee isn’t coffee unless it’s been “Instagrammed.” If you don’t tweet your emotions, then they just don’t exist. We all do it. It’s a way to connect with each other and feel important. Acceptance and approval are measured by the number of likes and favorites, friends and followers. We’re not the first generation to crave acceptance, and we’re certainly not the last. But we are a lonely generation. We gorge on social interaction and starve ourselves of human interaction. Think about how many times a classroom is silent before class starts. Every squeak of the chair grinds against the cinder blocks. Coughing is amplified and sneezing becomes a thousand times more dramatic. Everyone is on a phone, swiping through pictures, creeping on everyone else’s life and not living their own. You never know what you can learn from the person next to you. Take a break from emoticons, hashtags, cats and statuses that belong in diaries, and try your hand at a conversation. It’s a form of procrastination or maybe just a product of being nervous. Our phones have become our blankies. If there’s more than a minute of silence, it’s unnerving. So our necks crane over our phones, and our shoulders hunch into an amorphous mass of loneliness. Even in the middle of a conversation, not five minutes goes by and someone inevitably whips out a phone. The *bleep* of the phone becomes first priority versus the human in front of us. We’re all victims. We turn into zombies, clutching at our phones for life support. It bothers us when we wake up late for class and forget our phone. It’s hard to “fake text” without a phone when an awkward silence comes up. Put the phone down and look up. Challenge yourself this week to wean yourself off your dependence on your phone. When someone is talking, put your technology down and really listen. Employers are looking for new employees to bring knowledge of social media and mobile use to the job, and we’re pros at it. But our future jobs and lives won’t be lived as colorfully and action-packed in front our the screens of our smartphones as they can be stepping away from the screen. As the next generation, we are changing the world already. We need to learn how to balance content online and the life waiting to be lived offline. Let’s be good listeners, friends, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, workers and neighbors by taking breaks from our phones, embracing uncomfortable silences and living our lives.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 17:23:26 +0000
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