Cell Phones: The Downfall of Society’s Social Skills

Today’s society is all about speed; getting things done as fast as possible in the most efficient way. Cell phones are a main contributor to that. But are there some negative repercussions that go along with these mini devices of communication? Absolutely.

Many teens and young adults in today’s times have no clue how to have an actual conversation with another human being. They just whip out their phones and start texting the person in the other room. He’s three steps away! Just go talk to him! I know this weekend I was at a party and my friend who is pretty much surgically attached to his cell phone texted me while we were in the same room. I read it, got up, went over to him, put my cell phone in his face and said in an extremely boisterous fashion, “You have words! Use them!!” In my personal opinion, texting is the reason that English test scores are so low. We are forced to text in this language of abbreviations and therefore kids don’t know the real spellings of extremely common words.

Texting is not only cerebrally harmful, but it also is annoying and extremely dangerous. My mom is always yelling at me in the car to stop texting and have an actual conversation with her. I tell her to just be glad I’m not doing it in the driver’s seat. Countless car accidents are caused due to texting while driving. Some states have outlawed it but this doesn’t seem to stop some people. I mean if you don’t care about yourself, at least think of the passengers inside the car with you. I am one hundred percent positive that the conversation is not important enough to put yourself in danger in order to text while driving.

Texting allows you to communicate with someone without truly communicating. The number of text messages versus the number of phone calls made between the ages of 18 and 24 is astounding. 790 versus 265. And I’m sure that more than half of those phone calls are quick “Where are you” calls from Mom because unlike her kid, Mom knows how to talk to another human being. My own roommate will have me make the take-out delivery order because she has a serious fear of talking to a random stranger on the phone. So basically, today’s phobia of using a cell phone for what it was actually invented for is yesterday’s stage fright. Well, there’s only one way to get over it: practice! Don’t text someone with a serious conversation topic; Call them! If you don’t want to call them, then go see them! If you don’t want to go see them, then you probably don’t know this person well enough to be talking to them in the first place. Honestly, how many names and numbers of people do we have programmed into our phones with whom we would actually talk to in real life? It’s pretty pathetic and a little creepy.

Texting should be used sparingly. Texting is for those quick “Hey, I’m at lunch. Where are you?” conversations. So maybe if we put away our cell phones and actually start talking to people English test scores would go up, phobias would be cured, car accidents would be prevented and texting bills wouldn’t be through the roof. But if we continue on this path to solely virtual communication, soon enough we won’t need our mouths for talking. We’ll just have big projectors above our heads while carrying keyboards around to type how we feel in 160 characters or less, of course.