I love technology. I love my iPhone and the accessibility it offers. I love how connected I can stay with friends and family over Facebook. I love live-tweeting with thousands of other people and feeling the surge of an event travel across the globe.
But it’s time for a wake-up call. I know your grandparents have already told you this a thousand times, but I promise that my argument will not precede gross fruitcake or some rant about the good ole days. So hear me out.
Learn to turn your cell phones off. The sooner you see the merit in doing so, the better off you will be.
Last September, the Huffington Post reported on an experiment conducted in the United Kingdom. Most of us already realize how annoying it is to try to talk to someone who is constantly texting, checking Facebook or Snap-Chatting. But the research went beyond that. Simply having a cell phone in the same room begins to negatively impact interpersonal communication.
The studies, conducted by Andrew K. Przybylski and Netta Weinstein of the University of Essex, focused around two pairs of strangers who were asked to discuss a topic for 10 minutes at a time. One pair sat in a room without a cell phone present; the other pair conversed with a cell phone lying nearby. After the groups completed the experiment, the individuals were asked to fill out a questionnaire about the “relationship quality and feelings of closeness they had experienced.” According to the article, “the pairs who chatted in the presence of a cell phone reported lower relationship quality and closeness.”
Another similar experiment was set up to test the difference a cell phone can make when discussing either a casual or meaningful topic. The impact was insignificant for casual conversations, but “the phone’s presence significantly and detrimentally impacted relationship quality, trust and empathy in situations which the participants discussed something meaningful.”
The researchers concluded that “interacting in a neutral environment, without a cell phone nearby, seems to help foster closeness, connectedness, interpersonal trust and perceptions of empathy — the building-blocks of relationships.”
So get your cell phone out of the room every once in a while. Turn it off, forget about it and just sit down and talk to someone. We don’t form our close, intimate relationships with friends and family through our cell phones. We earn them through meaningful conversations, late nights spent talking for hours, shared experiences and doing our best to listen to each other.
I understand the argument that cell phones are beneficial. They help users to communicate quickly and effectively, stay in touch across the globe and meet new people or experience new ideas, but none of that is a substitute for real interaction, as awkward or as beautiful as it can be. The concept of digital communication is here to stay, and that offers amazing and exciting opportunities that will advance the human race. But don’t forget where we came from, because our past, and the fundamental ways relationships develop, will never change.
Moral of the story: Technology is advancing faster than ever before. It can be easy to fall into the trap of building a social life around our cell phones and the newest, hottest technology. As technology continues to be integrated into our lives, it becomes more and more essential to learn to distinguish between the real world and the digital world, between face-to-face interaction and interaction capable through a phone, and between what seems important and what truly is important.
