Michael Rostad
Scott DeLoach
ENGL 102
October 27, 2014
Addicted to Our Phones “With every passing day, technology is overtaking our daily lives. . . In fact, 56 percent of all Americans own [a smartphone]” (Archer). In the past half-decade, the amount of smartphones in use has skyrocketed from a measly tech-savvy hipster here and there to every person and their mother. Granted the authenticity of this statement is only valid in select developed countries, such as the United States, and more specifically, developed cities like Camarillo. By purely looking outside at the world around us, it is easy to see smartphones have caught the nation by storm. These devices are everywhere and have become integrated into most everything we do, whether it be going to the beach or even doing homework. Chances are you have your own smartphone within reaching distance of your seat right now. Smartphone users as a whole are subject to this temptation, because as time has gone on, these smartphones have become integrated into our society as well as integrated into the wiring of our brains. As these smartphones have been invisibly wired into users’ brains, and users have developed a “need” for their device, opposed to simply utilizing the smartphone for its capabilities. Statistics have shown that almost 75 percent of smartphone owners felt panicked when they lost their device to whereas only 6 percent of owners were relieved (Archer). This has led to the very real problem of nomophobia, where smartphone users become anxious, if not panicked over the misplacement of their phone or the inability to use it. Being wired to our cell phones has created a substantial amount of multitasking, seeing as these devices can be used for the immediate gratification of YouTube, texting, Facebook, and much more. Multitasking leads to an avalanche of problems for not only students, but adults as well. Tugend stated in her article that “[w]hile multitasking may seem to be saving time, psychologists, neuroscientists and others are finding that it can put us under a great deal of stress and actually make us less efficient.” It has become a norm for students to be working on homework, whether it is reading or solving arithmetic, and check their phone regularly. One extreme example of this, discussed in Ritchel’s article, is an addicted adolescent named Allison. At the young age of fourteen, Allison was already sending and receiving 27,000 text messages a month which comes out to approximately 900 a day. On top of this large amounts of texting, she also admitted to getting distracted from her school work due to her use of her smartphone, and later blames the slipping of her grades on this multitasking. Prior to the invention of wireless phones, multitasking was extremely limited to certain activities, to whereas now, the time to multitask is everywhere. Whether we are writing a paper and our phone is right beside us or we are having sex and we feel the need to shoot out a quick text, multitasking has become a cultural norm. For some, the latter idea seems bewildering, yet according to studies, one in five young adults will engage in this form of multitasking (Archer). This need to multitask, I feel, coincides with the need to be connected. Since the start of time, connections have been huge in society. All throughout primary school, students clump together in groups of similar interests, but too often, those who don’t fit in somewhere will try to change themselves in order to fit in. However, all of this can be found at the third level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as the need to belong. Pulling back and looking at the big picture, society itself can be broken down into cliques of material goods. For example, there is the Louise Vuitton clique, exclusive to those who own products made by Louise Vuitton. One of the largest of these social cliques is the clique confined to those who own smartphones, and even that is heavily divided into iPhones versus
