COMMUNICATION SKILLS TOPIC - How do computers and mobiles help us stay connected to the world? How can we avoid their overuse? write at least 50 words
Answers
Explanation:
As a tech writer who has written regularly about apps, I’m well aware of the addictive nature of smartphones. It was during a 2am panic attack after waking up, reaching for my smartphone and reading a tweetstorm about the latest Donald Trump controversy that I realised I may have a problem. That, and the fact that even my 10-year-old son had started telling me to put my phone down when he caught me not paying attention.
“It’s not necessarily the top thing when my clients come in, but it’s often in the mix, tied in with anxiety or insomnia or relationship issues,” says psychotherapist Hilda Burke, a spokesperson for National Unplugging Day in 2016 and 2017. “Particularly when anxiety and insomnia’s there, it’s rare that it’s not related in some way to heavy use of digital devices.”
Often, the apps themselves aren’t helping: from games to social networks, they’re precision engineered to create and feed our interaction neediness. According to British apps developer Nick Kuh: “A lot of these companies are employing behavioural psychologists to really nail that: finding ways to draw you back in. I’ve worked on apps like that myself, and it’s not something I’m proud of.”
If you were asked to go a day without your smartphone, do you think you could do it easily? Researchers who have asked participants to go without their phones for various periods of time have found that breaking the technology habit, even for a relatively short interval, can be exceedingly difficult.
Walk into any public venue and you will probably find people using their phones for a variety of purposes, from conducting business calls to checking their email to updating their Twitter. Our phones have become an inextricable part of our lives. But does this reliance on smartphones have any impact on our brains?
Some recent research suggests that it might. Experts suggest that all of this phone use can have an impact on children’s social and emotional development, that it can impair our sleep patterns, and that it might even turn some people into lazy thinkers.