A Teenagers’ Opinion of Phones.

Having a phone can be a great experience, it is a blessing and a curse at the same time. It is a blessing because when you get a phone or any sort of electronic device you have a more convenient lifestyle, you can call people from the other side of the world with the press of a button, but it can be a curse since you start depending on your phone and your screentime goes up but your productivity goes down. Not to take anything away from phones, they are a necessity now, I have one, you have one, everybody has one.

A child who gets a phone reminds me of a character from the movie Megamind, this character is a useless person, and so the protagonist gives him a potion to become a super-hero, he feels good, he is popular and is finally treated like someone important. After while he develops destructive tendencies, especially after he gets rejected by a girl and he goes from a person who was given a gift to do good to eventually becoming a villain. Give a child a phone and suddenly he has a lot of information in his hands, he can store a lot of photos, he suddenly becomes popular because the other children want to see his phone and then slowly he becomes addicted to it, he starts to lose sleep and he is at risk of being cyberbullied.

I also think that the reason why phones are viewed so badly, especially from parents is that the older generation did not have phones growing up. Handling a new device for an adult is easy, but for a child it is hard, that is why I think that my generation will be better parents when it comes to technology, we know what it is like to have a smartphone at a young age, we have grown up with them.

With that being said, I feel like there should be some rules and regulations with the age at which you should be given a phone, I think sixteen and above is a good age. The reason behind this is that we have an age limit for driving and alcohol, some drugs are banned, and medical drugs can only be taken after a certain age. In some cases, phones can be as addictive as drugs, the U.S. National Library Of Medicine found that people with smartphone addictions have fewer amounts of grey matter, the brain was causing this to happen, the brain reduces grey matter in the same way when we do cocaine. Mind you cocaine is illegal.

Smartphone addiction is curable, it happens to a lot of people and if you use your phone to find out how to cure that addiction, you have used your phone for a productive purpose. A smartphone does occasionally make me feel lonely, you see all these people on Instagram posting selfies together and showing the world that they are a couple. A survey conducted by two authors found that students who used their phones the most reported feeling more lonely and isolated than their less dependent peers. They were also found to have higher levels of anxiety and depression.

I think that’s where my generation is going wrong, we are letting our phones define us, the number of likes we get and the number of comments we get determines our happiness. Every new comment makes us feel happy, we have gotten to the point where we cannot differentiate between the social media world and the real world, it is the reason why I deleted Instagram. You forget about savouring the moment and you start thinking about getting a hundred likes. Tyler Durden in Fight Club talks about how people let their cars and houses define them or how they think they are the contents inside their wallets. With my generation, you are not the number of followers you have or the number of likes and views that you get, that should never define you.

To be honest, you cannot blame smartphones, they are inanimate objects, and companies have to make profits, they have to progress and innovate so that they can continue to exist, the only person to blame for the shortcomings that come with a smartphone is you. If you cannot handle a phone, then take responsibility for it.

Our reality becomes distorted the second we look at our phones, we are not in the world anymore, we are on the planet Instagram or we are stuck in the Twitterverse, sooner than we think we will be thrust into the real world as adults, forced to take responsibility, the quicker we take responsibility the higher our chances of success will be. I think my generation can take responsibility, we have learnt to take responsibility for our phones and devices well, it is just imitating that ability on a larger scale.

You can’t deny that having a phone is a good experience. We have so much information in our hands, we can make money online and we have a device by which we can form good relationships with people who we rarely get to meet. We get to see what a celebrity does and how they think, we can learn new skills and still stay sane during a time like this.

To conclude this is my explicit opinion on phones, they can make or break you, they cannot be blamed because you have to take responsibility for your actions, I hope in the future there are rules and regulations with regards to smartphone usage and age.