86% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. And with the creation, developments, and improvements of various social media platforms, it has become a lot more difficult for people to separate technology from reality and just simply speak. We have become increasingly addicted to this artificial world.
Let me paint a picture for you. It’s a normal Wednesday at school for you, that is, until you’re reminded of the painful fact that you have a test tomorrow. After you’ve completely freaked out and have had a mini panic attack, all that your brain is telling you to do is “STUDY!”. You get home and see that you’ve received a dm on Instagram from a very special person, so you spend the next hour texting each other. After that, you decide to go on TikTok for “20 minutes” but before you know it, 20 minutes has turned into an hour. You then realise that you haven’t completed the Netflix series you started during the weekend and your brain has successfully tricked you into thinking that now is the time to complete it. It’s now dark outside as you’ve unconsciously wasted an entire afternoon’s worth of studying.
Sound familiar? I know it does for me and many of you reading this at this very moment. Technology has taken over our lives. A lot of us lose our minds during the dreaded Stage 6 load shedding and cling onto the hope that our devices won’t die within that space of time. And when they do, we’d rather go and take a lengthy nap than go and have a conversation with those that we live with. Because technology has made us forget how to be human. We are so used to communicating with people over the phone that the idea of physically interacting with people has become a terrifying thing for many hence the sudden rise in social anxiety across the globe.
Many of us spend our waking hours with a bright screen in front of our faces. The psychological development of adolescents is slowing down while mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety are on the rise according to many psychologists. Our attention spans have also dramatically decreased as well as our ability to focus on one, specific thing. This is because our brains have been conditioned to watch and listen to 15 second videos as we constantly scroll and scroll. Many students are now unable to sit through a typical 1-hour lesson without getting distracted by other things. We get bored so easily now because we’ve become so dependent on technology to be our only source of entertainment and comfort. We’d much rather spend an hour on the phone with someone as opposed to spending an hour with them in person.
Senseless scrolling has become a typical afternoon activity for most of us. I truly believe that we need to try and embody our lives pre technology. Obviously not completely because the reality is that technology is and will probably always be around but let’s be people again. Humans are an inherently social species that rely on cooperation and communication to thrive. This cooperation and communication is not an electronic one but more so a communication that goes beyond the screen. Beyond an app. Beyond a keyboard.