Smart Phones: Addiction or Obsession? (Part 2)

By Kelly Logie, 1/23/17

Current Seattle resident and marketing assistant, Elizabeth “Liz” Carson, is one of those people who claims to be attached to her phone. She will never go anywhere without it, because it gives her anxiety not having it right next to her all the time.

Her and her friends are self-proclaimed phone addicts. When they are all together, they are on their phones and hardly have meaningful conversations anymore.

Until one day things were put into perspective.

Carson had to run errands before her friends’ surprise birthday dinner one evening, and she only had a few hours to spare.

She got done with class, went to her car and immediately checked her phone. She had received multiple texts from friends in a group message making sure she was picking up the cake and other decorations.

After picking up the cake from the grocery store, she started looking for her phone and keys in the parking lot. Carson dug through her purse where she usually keeps them, but they were not there.

Carson sprinted to her car and her worst nightmare came true.

There they were. Both her phone and keys sitting in one of the cup holders. She was locked out of her car with no access to her beloved smart phone. She panicked.

“How could I do this?” she thought. “I am never without my phone, and today is the one day I forget to put it in my purse.”

She checked each door. Locked.

A text message popped up on her screen while she was looking at her phone through the window. It was from one of her friends asking what time they were meeting that night.

“I can see my phone, but I can’t do anything about it,” she thought. She felt hopeless. So close yet so far away.

On the bright side, she had AAA. On the down side, she had no phone to contact them to get help.

Stressed, Carson went back into the grocery store and asked one of the store clerks if she could get access to a phone to make a call.

She got ahold of AAA, and they gave her an estimated time of an hour until they would get to her. She didn’t have a lot of time to waste.

Trying to calm herself down, she walked over to the coffee shop next door, sat down and waited.

She wasn’t angry about being locked out of her car, even though it was an inconvenience. She was angry at herself for leaving her phone in the car. She couldn’t scroll through Instagram like she usually did when she had nothing to do. She couldn’t even call or text someone letting them know she might be late to the surprise party.

Then, she started thinking about how attached she was to her phone. She took it everywhere. She even would take it to the bathroom. She was never without it.

Carson began people watching, and a light bulb went off.

They weren’t looking at their phones.

People were having face-to-face conversations. They were engaged with each other in a very personal, intimate way. No phones. No technology at all.

She overheard two women as they were leaving, discussing how they were at the coffee shop for two and a half hours just talking to each other and enjoying each other’s company.

“I wish my friends and I could do that,” Carson thought.

Sooner than expected, AAA ended up coming to unlock her car around twenty minutes later. Carson felt like she had been reunited with a loved one after leaving her phone in the car for that long.

In that moment, Carson realized that her phone shouldn’t be a such a high priority.

Carson said, “I keep telling myself that, but how do I actually follow through?”

Good question.

Smart phones are a funny subject.

Think about it.

We are constantly looking down at a little rectangular device that contains access to any information that we could possibly ever want. The phrase, “we have the whole world at our fingertips” couldn’t be more accurate. They have completely changed the way we operate, and how we interact with one another. But, is this a good or bad thing?

The world is now tiny, all thanks to smart phones. We can communicate with people we haven’t seen in years, and people who live on different continents. Businesses, industries, entertainment and communication in general have been positively impacted by technology.

But, here’s the problem. As a college student who is constantly on my phone, my online life seems to be consuming my offline life. I can’t just pretend the online world is fake, because it is real. I can’t just turn that part of my life off. Why can’t I make that distinction anymore?

Is this what addiction feels like? I wanted to find out and hear from my peers.

I asked college students and recent graduates about how they felt about smart phones. I heard their stories, personal experiences, and their opinions on if this is really becoming a serious addiction topic.

Whitworth University junior Madison Pillo isn’t happy with how much time she spends on her phone, particularly during daily activities.

“I feel like I need my phone at all times, even when I’m doing tasks when I shouldn’t need it,” she said. “I especially need it when I’m eating.”

Pillo feels as if any free time she has, it is spent on her phone. When she’s eating or doing homework, she’s finds herself constantly scrolling through social media pages to fulfill her time.

“I can never sit down and do something without my phone being right next to me,” she said. “When I do homework, I check my phone at least three or four times while I’m doing an assignment.”

I asked Pillo if there are certain boundaries that need to be created in regards to smart phone usage, and her response amused me.

The shower.

“I have friends who take their phone into the shower with them. I have never done that. I feel like you are truly addicted if you can’t handle ten minutes without your phone.”

Pillo went on to tell me about how social media is an influencer to how often we use our phones, based off of peer pressure.

She explained that the concept of read receipts on text messages can make an impact to have often you check your phone.

“If you are texting someone and they have their read receipts on, then you are more inclined to keep checking the message to look if they’ve seen it. If read receipts are off, then you just wonder if they’ve got it and wait for a message back.”

From personal experience, social media is one of the main reasons why I feel like I have an addiction to my smart phone, and why I think others do as well. Due to the concept of likes.

Accounting intern and Seattle resident, Lucas Ross, knows this issue all too well.

Last spring, Ross’s girlfriend asked him if he wanted to visit a local museum. Ross agreed of course, because he thought a day at a museum with his girlfriend would be a fun distraction from the stress of school.

Once Ross and his girlfriend had arrived at the museum, his expectations of an exciting day came to a halt.

His girlfriend immediately pulled out her phone and asked Ross to take a photo of her in front of the building.

Not just one photo. She kept asking for pictures until she got the “right one.”

Ross spent at least thirty minutes taking photos of her, because she had to “post the best one to Instagram to get a lot of likes.”

He didn’t enjoy his time at the museum because of the so-called photoshoot. His girlfriend was on her phone looking at the photos the rest of the time they spent walking through the museum, instead of being in the moment and soaking in the artwork.

She spent hours deciding which picture to post, editing it and trying to settle on a good caption. Once she uploaded the photo, she kept refreshing the page to see who liked it and kept track of how many likes she was getting.

Is this what our world is coming to? Being addicted to our phones because of social pressures? Is this becoming a true addiction with our generation?

Let’s turn to the experts.