A Day Without My Blackberry

Not having a cell phone for a day? Yeah, it stinks but it’s manageable, right? Not if you have Blackberry. I only recently acquired a Blackberry. I got one free in a buy two Blackberry deal because my Dad needed one for work. I figured it would be helpful for those days my Hebrew professor liked to email us about five minutes before class to say she wouldn’t be able to make it. Yes, the Blackberry messenger aspect seemed cool, unnecessary but cool.

Seeing as we have to write a blog post a week, I’ve been having a little trouble coming up with new ideas. So the other day my Blackberry was exploding with Facebook updates and text messages wishing me a happy 20^th birthday. While I greatly appreciated all the love, I wondered what it would be like to go a day without all the emails and BBM’s. The next day I woke up, unplugged my phone from its charger and put it in my desk drawer and vowed not to look at it until the next morning.

At first, it wasn’t so bad. I checked my email once before I left my dorm and didn’t have to worry about it until later. I was forced to actually pay attention in theory class rather than hope for some outside contact. Then lunchtime rolled around. Because I couldn’t

text my friends to see who was free for lunch, I just went to the Commons hoping I would run into someone to sit with. I didn’t. I sat alone, awkward as ever, and ate my lunch as fast as I could. Then I went back to my room, my fingers itching to check for text messages, so I checked my email instead. Again. I was surprised to find an urgent email from my Dad asking frantically why I wasn’t responding to his BBM’s and phone calls. Apparently he needed to book my ticket home for Thanksgiving as soon as possible and needed to talk to me. After that moderate bump in the road, I did some homework and started to get ready for Chorale practice. I realized that I didn’t know if we were having an earlier practice than usual because we have a concert coming up. I couldn’t text anyone about it so I checked to see if anyone was on Facebook. No one was so I went to the DoYo early just to be safe. I ended up waiting there for an unnecessary extra 45 minutes.

These are only some of the obstacles I faced without my Blackberry but I think they exemplify the difficulty of my day. Cell phones may be good for keeping in touch with people, but having yours with you at all times can lead to things like addiction, car accidents, and sleep loss. Also, the actual device itself can cause radiation due to the magnetism of the technology. In terms of phones like Blackberrys, iPhones, and Droids, because of all the applications, multitasking can prove harmful to your ability to concentrate on a sole task and lead to decreasing test scores.

So try putting down your Blackberry for a day. I’m embarrassed to say how hard it was for me to get along without constantly checking my Facebook but I think I learned that maybe all these social networks are not healthy for a hardworking college student. Everyone should try a day without constant emails, texts, Facebook updates and Twitter posts and see how crucial these things are to our lives in current society.

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.