The technology that has been released in the past couple decades is extremely innovative and powerful. Smartphones have been one of the biggest contributors to this expansion on the field of technology. But how good are smartphones actually for society? Most people own smartphones, and most of those people have it on them 24/7. There are numerous arguments coming from both the sides of those who think smartphones are beneficial to society, and those who feel that they are disadvantageous to our society.
Smartphones do have a tremendous amount of potential. They have already done the impossible, and are able to connect almost every human being on the planet. Connection and communication in a split second is something that generations before smartphones thought would never be possible, yet here we are releasing iPhone upon iPhone, each one with more bells and whistles than the last one. Those bells and whistles have incredible capabilities of their own as well. Things like GPS, photo and video quality, social media apps, and with almost 3 million apps in the public, its hard not to "have an app for that". However, with all of these advances in the smartphone world already, its hard to tell how this can be managed to a certain degree. There are many people that disagree with the statement that smartphones have been beneficial to our society, but say that not only are they not beneficial, but that smartphones are straight up dangerous to society. Numerous studies have been done that link smartphone use with the development of certain cancers. Some also say that smartphones are to blame for the unprecedented spike in car accidents recently. Smartphones are also disadvantageous in the way of our relationships with each other. Young children are becoming insanely good at using this new technology, but how will that effect their abilities to form relationships with people, and be able to have face to face interactions?
There are an incredible amount of arguments for each side of this topic, and that is why this semester, I am calling for an action of education. There may not be a way to completely regulate smartphone use under our constitution, since there is so much backlash on the government for doing too much of that already. However, I think the best plan of action in the case of smartphones is to do more educating for everyone, but mostly in young people. For example, in the case of cigarette smoking, people overused cigarettes before we knew just how bad they were. After research was released about all of the negative impacts smoking can have on the human body, there was an exponential decrease in the use of cigarettes. Sure, some people still smoke, but at least we as a society are educated on the subject and know the risks. That is my goal for the case of smartphones: to educate in a way that will help decrease smartphone use as a society.
I follow the approach, but you've got a couple different angles that seem to demand different responses. Leaning on the cancer risk would call for more drastic action than just education campaigns, I would suspect. But for the main argument against smart phones, you're going to have to find a way to appeal to educators to spend money and time to do this, and then have a way these educators can appeal to students, without making smart phone use a way to rebel against school. It's definitely a topic I'm rather familiar with from my research in media ecology. As a lead, Sherry Turkle's the big name.
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