Technology can be our best friend, yet it can also be the biggest party harm to our lives. This is true for smart phones. The most trendy gadget in the technological scene, that constantly interrupts our own life story, meddling with our ability to have thought or daydream, or striking friends with fellow close humans, because we are caught up in this limbo constantly bridging the walk from cafeteria back to the office on phone, awakened by the sirens and the shouts.
That is the biggest problem with smart phones, addiction, which stems from the wide range of exhilarating choices presented by smart phones coupled with fast internet. Just with a click, one can access various social media sites like Twitter and Instagram, shopping site like Amazon, stream music live from sites Sportify, watch movies on You Tube and read real time news from all corners of the globe. Work today has been reduced to juggling between playing video games on phone, streaming movies, posting pictures on Snapchat, and chatting the day away on Whatsapp.
The addiction has erased the past walks that used to be taken to parks, meeting friends over coffee and deliberating real issues face to face, or reading books in the library, and substituted it with life-by-a-click.Without technology, most people feel naked, stripped and lonely because of the close attachment to their gadgets that they have developed over the years. Today, a vacation is not complete without a smart phone to record the scenic views and the juicy moments to be uploaded in real time on social media for the world to see. The effect of addition has synthesized other effects such as obesity, lack of creativity, laziness, anti-social behaviors, and many others.
Besides, using smartphones to access the internet has not always been rosy especially in this age of heightened global insecurities. Given the lack of privacy on most social media sites, and its unmonitored and uncensored nature, many people have fallen victims of defilement’s by pedophiles, pornographic perverts, human trafficking, drug abuse, and even terrorism. Just recently, ISIS has been on the record recruiting very many Jihadi teen fighters via twitter from Europe and luring them into fighting in Syria.
Infamous drug cartels in North And south America such as Sinaloa and Shining Path have established social media accounts for recruiting clients of their substances and also sellers. In Asia, the deadly human trafficking gangs have infiltrated into social media and very many teens especially females have fallen prey to their disguises. All these have been exacerbated by the use of Smart phones, which are now more private, thus used to access any site online.
Furthermore, this whole craze about smart phones has exerted unnecessary pressure not only on the teens but also to their families. Getting to own some of these technological gadgets can cost an arm and a leg, while maintaining them exerts significant toll financial impacts on finances on the users. Besides, many online platforms is all about glamour and glitz, and way of life is endorsed by celebrities and socialites thus initiating unnecessary pressure of trying to keep up with the rich, image-conscious few in the society and eventually plunging the people into unnecessary anxiety, debt, identity crisis and even depression. It is because of such events that plastic surgeries have skyrocketed over the years, as the internet has glorified flawless looks and sassy dresses and other material things.
The rise in use of smart phones has also led to widespread and merciless butchery of formally established languages. Social media is for instance, is hinged on use of brief communications which compels its users to shorten their words in order to pass a message. Some of these shortened words have overtime found their way into the dictionaries, while some have widely been accepted as part of the slang language. The Smart phones input languages recognizes some of these words, thus contributing to slaying of formal languages.
In a nutshell, the downside effects of the use of smart phones on transcend all sectors of lives for all ages of people. The magnitude of this effect has been felt by all age brackets to the extent that the adults are now craning towards use of smart phones to access material online i.e in e-learning, shopping, or marketing company products. Like the danger of a single story, social media use amongst teenagers is a bitter-sweet issue.