Wednesday 28 November 2018

Cellphone: my invisible addiction


By Lina María Silvina Sánchez Rivas (The World in English elective)

“We already found our favourite landscape, the cell phone”



To write this article I decided to see how much time I spent using my cell phone last week. I realized that every day I'm on the phone for 2 to 3 hours, which means that during the week (Monday to Friday) I used the cell phone for on average 15 hours. The applications that I dedicated most time to were Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Up to this point, it seems that it is the common way that anyone uses his or her cell phone. However, with this mini-experiment I realized that I usually interrupt my activities by taking a look at the cell phone, or I feel the need to check in between classes, or while I'm on the bus, even if i don’t need to communicate with anyone. I just slide my finger on the screen and get lost in the sea of photos, videos and quotes found in these applications.

According to an investigation made by Dr. José Matías Delgado, addictions are "repetitive habits, lack of control of a pleasant behavior that compromises the person in all areas including health". With this definition I have begun to believe that I have some degree of addiction to the cell phone, which generates anxiety.

After the mini-experiment I spoke with family and friends to try to discover what makes us so aware of the cell phone, and we all agree that it is an easy way to communicate, to know about the lives of others without asking, to give our opinions, but above all It is a way of being in many places without even moving.

The reflection I make about all this is that the way we connect with the world has distanced us from ourselves, separates us from our activities and has taken a good percentage of our concentration. It has generated a dependency and addiction that we are hardly able to assume.

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