Phoney Parental Power?

     I'm sure I don't have to repeat the phrase "you are on your phone too much, back in my day [insert what your parents used to do here] because you probably have heard it a bit too much by now. They aren't completely wrong, you probably are on your phone way too much for your own good. However, could our parents learn this own lesson for themselves as well? When we hear about overusing phone usage, it is easy to think about teenagers and younger adolescents who are using it too much that parents are not ever the topic of discussion for phone usage. While parents may have a more practical use for phone usages like work, emails, and calls, they cannot avoid the addictive nature of mindlessly scrolling through their phones and catching up on the latest family gossip. 

    So we know that phones are not always the best piece of technology, especially considering how addictive their general nature is because of our underlying fear of boredom. In Dr. Vrooman's Social Media & Society class, we were asked about how much control we believe to have over our phones where we could genuinely give them up and not use them. The highest percentage was 40%... This means that the "strongest" person who has the most self-control over their phone in the classroom has about 40% control over their phone while the remaining 60 means they give in to the temptation of their phone. That's actually quite sad if you think about it and many of us are probably around that mark if you are being honest with each other. Though, is it really all that surprising? I mean, the stereotype of phone usage is mainly targeted at younger adults and teens after all so this seems to prove that theory to be somewhat true for our sample size of Vrooman's classroom at the very least. The problem is that if we are focused on just one group of people and not the rest of the population and how phone usage, we might not be able to fully adjust our society to the addictive nature of our phones.

Yes, parents can ignore their children via their phones too

    In order to better think about this, if you are in the vicinity of your parents or you are living with someone who is older than you, casually see how long they are on their phone and what exactly they are doing. We know the classic, "kids these days" phrase but if you take a look at how much your parents and elders use their phones too, you would probably be surprised. I have often told my parents that they use their phones a lot more than I do as I see them sitting on the couch usually going through Facebook. According to the NY Post, parents actually only give about 24 minutes more attention to their kids than they do to their phones on average. I would hypothesize that parents and kids actually use phones for about the same amount of time, just for different situations which leads to the difference that we know today between generations.

    

    Whether we like it or not, phones are almost necessary and are often seen as a commodity, especially within countries that rely on technology more than ever for work and communication. Not to mention that this has been increased since the pandemic happened. This explains why our parents and elders use the phone more frequently it seems because they are attached to it as they wait for that call they are expecting from work or for that email they need to know what the next steps are to complete a certain goal for their job. When you feel as though you are inseparable from your phone, it makes it easier to get addicted to different websites and games in order to pass time as you are waiting for your job to respond or for that one family member to finally send that message through Messenger on Facebook. So in reality, phones do help adults out with important aspects of their life, but the addictive grasp of cellphones also gets stronger the more you use them as one might assume. This is fairly evident with my parents as just the other day when we were at Outback, my father kept getting calls and emails from his work, even though he was supposed to be off and enjoying time away from it to destress while my mom practically lives off Facebook as she scrolls through it to keep up her social obligation with her family and friends. 

    All of this is not to try and derail from the fact that younger generations use technology and their cellphones a lot as well. As mentioned before, I was really surprised to find out that about half of my time had been taken up by my phone but also not surprised at the same time considering that is all I have really been doing recently. We know that everyone can get mentally addicted to their phone, so that is not necessarily the goal of what I am trying to address here. The issue I want to address here is that we should be analyzing the addictive properties of our phones across the board and see how what kind of effect it has on different age groups. We often like to think that we are masters over our devices, that we could give them up at any given time should we want to. But that 40% mentioned earlier and that little 24 minutes extra of attention given to children by parents paint a different picture for us. Does this mean we are fully powerless to our phones? Not necessarily. You can start small with challenges that try to actively gauge your mind away from your phone like trying to do the challenges in Manoush Zomorodi's book, Bored and Brilliant as a start to try and see what a few days of less phone usage are like and see if you can take baby steps to essentially untrain your mind from phone usage. However, we should also not be afraid of our phones either as we know we need regardless of how we feel. It is a matter of gaining control and power over our phones rather our phones to have control and power over us is what we must face together as a collective society.