Teen Tech Experiment: Can teens survive without their cell phones?
Brian Wally
Prof. Jason Pomposelli
CS110
A study to see how people could live without their phones was done on a few
teenagers. They teenagers were all workers and the Boys and Girls Clubs that helps kids
have fun and give them a place to hang out. The five teenagers that admitted to sending
about 50 texts a day gave up texting, e-mail, instant messaging, Facebook and Myspace
for a week. Now you would think this would be an easy task but with the way this
generation is acting with their technology this study could prove just how addicted we all
our to our phones.
After only one day they felt like something was missing. One of the boys said, “I
kind-of miss the feeling in my pocket.” But that wasn’t even the biggest problem, three
of the five were late that day because they usually depended on their phones to wake
them up in the morning. I would be one of those people, I keep my phone by my bed
with alarms to wake me up the next morning for class. I don’t own a watch like the kids
in the study so I would be lost as to what time it was for most of the day which would
also cause me to be late to classes even during the day.
Another problem the kids came across was they couldn’t get in touch with their
relatives for a ride, they had to go use the school’s phone or find another landline which
as you could imagine isn’t an easy thing to do. This would also cause a problem for me
as well, I just pledged a fraternity that had spontaneous meetings and specific times to be
places. Now how would I have known to meet somewhere or what time to be someplace
if I couldn’t receive a phone call telling me to be there? There are no landlines in the
dorms and I wouldn’t have been able to use the Internet to get into contact ether. It
would have been like I dropped off the face of the earth if I didn’t have these things.
The kids of this generation are also masters at multi-tasking. “They use phones,
computers and carry on face-to-face conversations at the same time,” Joe Fryer says in
the article. We do do that very well but what people are concerned about is how that will
affect us later on down the road. The parents notice that yea we can multi-task but we are
not focusing on one thing and finishing it; we do multiple things and only maybe halfway
do something. Like me, I know if I was cleaning my room and one of my friends called
me to see if I wanted to get some food I would drop the cleaning and leave and would
never get back around to cleaning my room.
Later in the week since the teenagers didn’t have their phones they were more
focused at work and got more things done. Their boss said about one of the girls, “her
ability to concentrate is so much better, I mean, she literally is unable to associate with
people when she has her phone.” So without their phones they are able to participate in
activities and not worry about when the next text will arrive or the conversations with
their friends. This I know would work, because sometimes if I can’t get work done most
of the time it is because of my phone, so I will shut it off and just set it aside and I get
work done so much faster.
Some of the positive results they found from this experiment were that it was
forcing them to keep busy in new ways. One of the boys said, “keeping myself busy so I
don’t think about it.” He joined the school’s soccer team so he could keep busy and not
think about it. So think about this; if all of America put their phones away for a week,
could that cause us to be more athletic and get out of our houses? It would cause us to
think freely and not just sit inside, another girl from the study said, “I got back to my
artistic side.” So within a week of not having her phone she was able to sit down and
begin painting again. If we weren’t so attached to our technology that would give us so
much more free time to do things we ourselves enjoy doing; such as painting or playing
soccer.
Using all of this technology is killing out face-to-face communication. Teenage
breakups are more likely to happen in a text now a days then it would in person; I know
I’ve done it! Gurak chairs of the U of M’s department of writing studies said, “you don’t
have to look the person in the eye, but that’s not a good thing, that’s part of learning to
live in the world with people is to make those uncomfortable statements or have to have
an uncomfortable conversation.” This is diffidently true with my generation because I
know most of us wouldn’t make that extra effort to go meet the person to have that
conversation. I think it is because were afraid of that confrontation, of how that person
will react. That is not a good thing that we are running away from that; like Gurak said
we need to learn how to do that to survive in everyday life. When we get older if you’re
a boss will you just send an employee an e-mail saying they’re fired instead of telling
them yourself? That is the road we are heading down it’s up to us to change that as much
as we can. Technology has become too much a part of our lives now so it might be
something we realize too late.
This data shows that 70% of the people I interviewed had broken up with
someone over text or the internet, and 16% of that 70% had done it in both ways; only a
small 14% have never. There was a higher percentage of males who said they had done it
but there was also a large amount of females who had done it as well, so it was pretty
even in that case. I interviewd about 75 people about this ranging in age from between
14-20. This proves what they were saying in that study because we are letting technology
take over our social lives. How are we going to be able to function socuially when we’re
older if we act this way in our young-adult ages? This isnt a good thing that we are this
afraid of a small confrontation such as a break-up with a boyfriend/girlfriend.