Put Your Phone Down
Today I ate lunch in the dining hall at Middlebury College. I grabbed my food and weaved through tables to get to where my friends were sitting. I walked by a table of roughly twelve people, all of whom were on their phone. Their eyes were glued to their screens, faces blank, body language closed off. I walked by another table sporting roughly the same statistic. If you came to eat lunch with your friends, why are you texting other people, scrolling through Instagram, or checking your Facebook notifications?
I have noticed that some of my friends keep their phones facing upwards on the table when sitting with just me or in a group. This tempts them to glance down at it with shocking frequency, and of course respond to a text message, Instagram like, or GroupMe notification the second it comes in. I recently told a friend that these actions bothered me, and her responses were: “I need to stay on top of GroupMe notifications, because once you get behind you have to scroll back to re-read the conversation” and “What if it’s important?”
Are you kidding me?
Your willingness to spend an obscene amount of time on your phone during real-time interactions with your friends, just so that you can stay on top of a group chat that you could easily just check later, sends a very clear message to the people around you about your priorities.
Newsflash, you’re probably at lunch for roughly half an hour: what are the odds that something that urgent is going to notify you and require your immediate attending?
I am not perfect and am often guilty of this same behaviour. But as someone who makes a conscious effort to leave my phone in my pocket when interacting with people and prefers to check notifications on my walk to class, I find it very offensive when a friend is constantly checking their phone the entire time we are having a face-to-face interaction. It makes me feel pretty unimportant.
I recently walked to class during the morning rush with my phone in my pocket and no headphones. I probably walked past 100 people, two dozen that I know. Seemingly everyone had their head down, eyes fixated on their SnapChat, and would look up periodically to give a feeble “hey” to people they knew walking towards them. I often walk around like this, sometimes even using my phone as an excuse to say hi to someone I know and then avoid the awkwardness of the prolonged walk towards each other having already said hello. This is not normal behaviour, but it has become normalized in our society today.
When I am faced with a situation where I am with a person or in a group and they pull out their phone, I find myself doing the same — to fill an awkward void where an in-person, real-time interaction should be taking place. Smartphones have become ingrained into every moment of our lives. We use it as a social tool, filling any lulls in conversation, because we have become trained to be uncomfortable with even a moment of silence. Even alone, we fill silence by re-watching Instagram stories, or stalking people on Facebook.
We are at a point where we are so in tune with our phones that we sometimes perceive vibrations from a device that is not vibrating. The mere presence of a mobile device is detrimental to social interactions.
This modern-day phenomenon — what has indeed been normalized — has been coined “phubbing”: phone snubbing.
A study done at Baylor University found that relationships in which “phubbing” occurred were more likely to experience conflict and have lower levels of satisfaction (David & Roberts, 2017). It is not surprising, but something as ubiquitous as cellphone use can undermine the foundation of our relationships. Moreover, given that we are constantly juggling multiple relationships at a time via technology, we have the illusion of proximity to multiple people, even though we are only “maintaining” these relationships with such an incredibly low level of interaction, which are taking precedence of in-person interactions which would otherwise be more meaningful and provide us with a feeling of higher levels of relationship satisfaction and proximity.
I am not arguing against smartphone use altogether, I am simply suggesting that we all make a concerted effort to be more present and less distracted when we are in social settings. We are addicted to our smartphones, which is only enforced by both the tolerance that we have all developed, whereby we don’t call out the people we are with for their behaviour, and the expectation of lightning quick responses from our friends. It is time that we all start taking conscious actions to lose these tendencies.
