Ethics Of Mobile Phone Overuse And Its Impact On Interpersonal Relationships

Introduction

Phones have made a huge impact in society in the last 10 years. To be able to enter the internet from your pocket, to talking with someone that lives halfway across the world. Having lunch with your friends you see people all around on their phones instead of talking to the people around them. Constantly people scroll through social media looking at random stuff, playing games and constantly text other people. When people are on their phones constantly communication is lost because people are not having face to face interactions. Many other things got ruined other than just limiting our communication skills.

For example, people who made cameras or GPS’s are not needed anymore because phones can do everything and separate devices are not needed. Applications that phones have, has given us a way for us to hide behind the screen. Our posture is getting worse and people are losing their confidence from looking down at their phone too much. The idea of looking up when you are in a public place is such a scary thing nowadays because people do not want other people to talk to them. Social skills and face to face interactions are damaged from impersonal communication because we are unable to express body language, tone, voice, touch and facial expressions because of text message.

Abstract

In my paper, I will be analyzing how overuse of phones has affected our communication and social skills through the theories of constitutive rhetoric and moral imagination under the idea of ethics. The topics that I expand on are how phones are becoming an addiction, kids are becoming more socially awkward also how posture is becoming a big issue and how communication worsened society. I look under the theories of constitutive rhetoric and moral imagination and how they correlate to the overuse of phones.

Also, I talk about how ethics correlates with how phones have ruined communication and our social skills. Then, I examine the statistics of iPhones new feature of screen time that shows how long someone spends on their phone and their average phone use. With the screen time feature I look up the statistics of how long someone is on their phone for a day, a week and on average. In my conclusion I summarize everything and how overuse of phones can be improved. By studying the screen time report on iPhones, from the ideas of constitutive rhetoric and moral imagination, I argue that overuse of phones have damaged society.

Theory

Ethics plays a major role in how we view life because it allows us to see the world in many different ways. There are many definitions of ethics, but one is the idea of being right or wrong. Ethics helps with knowing that there are many different ideas and information that everybody does not see in the same way and that there is more to everything we know. Paula Tompkins describes ethics as “the study and practice of what is good and bad, right and virtuous” (Para 1). Using the idea of ethics in everyday life is useful to see situations in a different way. The theory of constitutive rhetoric under the definition of Michael J. Hyde is “the idea that discourse analysis speaks to the importance of rhetoric relationships with ethics in their investigation of language-in-use, the meaning in controversial encounters with people and the moral implications that media has done to public life” (Para.4).

Hyde also explains that ethics, rhetoric, and discourse is seen in everyday life and it lies in the heart. Paula Tompkins expands on the idea of moral imagination where moral imagination is the idea that people should see information in not just one viewpoint but also exploring the full range of possibilities of the topic. Moral imagination should be used by everyone because it allows for two different viewpoints to be able to look at the other side to. Phone overuse and ethics relates with the idea that being constantly on the phone our interaction and communication skills with each other are weakening.

Constitutive rhetoric under Michael J. Hyde definition correlates with overuse of phones through the idea of language, tone, personal encounters and the media. Our overuse allows us not to be able to communicate to each other like we did in the past. Having these applications and a way of being able to communicate to people let us communicate in different ways that we have not had before. We use emojis or gifs to express how we feel in conservation and even use them to make the conservation more exciting. Since people are constantly on their phones looking down posture is getting worse and our human interactions are becoming awkward because people do not know how to act in that kind of situation because we feel like we should go straight to scrolling through our phones. Many are not able to hold a conversation with people because many do not like the idea of getting to know someone new.

The media does not help with the overuse of phones, they help feed the information someone wants to see and keeps feeding them so they can spend hours on the phone scrolling through things that are not important. James Boyd White defines constitutive rhetoric as “capacity of language or symbols to create a collective identity for an audience, especially by means of condensation symbols, literature, and narratives” (White). White explains that we all have an identity and that we should build one. People like the idea of having their phones by the at all times because it almost feels like it is there security that they know that their phone is there. I see that the theory of constitutive rhetoric corresponds with phone overuse because we are not showing who we are as an actual person because we are on our phones that we are hiding behind the screen and only talking to people we know.

Moral imagination defined by Paula Tompkins is that we should see things from all points of view. I use this theory seeing that there are both sides to everything and that not everybody sees through the same lens. Mark Johnson defines moral imagination as “envisioning the full range of possibilities in a particular situation in order to solve an ethical challenge” (Johnson).

Johnson also emphasizes that acting morally often requires more than just strength of your character but requires empathy and awareness to know what is morally relevant in a given situation. Under this theory I see that because I believe that humanity is constantly on their phones and have made it harder for people to communicate and go through the day. Also, I see that there are people that look on the other side and that phones have helped humanity and have made things easier. I agree with the idea that it has made many things easier for people but it should not mean that we should be on our phones constantly.

Context

Phone addiction has been a major problem in recent years. Addiction can start from the parents, they give their children cell phones at a young age to prevent crying but once they take them away they start crying because they want it back. Phones cause much harm in society from being able to talk to anyone and even is distracting when driving. Cyberbullying has increased because phones have made it easier to capture events and lie behind the screen. Many people find it better to talk bad about other people because they are not saying it in front of them but instead behind a screen. The obsession of constantly looking at your phone to see if there is a notification. The phone itself is not the addiction, but the games, apps, and the online world is the addiction. Heavy phone use can be symptomatic of many other problems, such as stress, anxiety, depression, or loneliness.

Phones negatively impact your life because kids like the idea that they should look their best on social media and want to be like the people they see on social media. This causes them to check up on the newest trend and or see what people are doing they can do it. Many kids think that the idea of being famous is all they want to do, they see kids their age get famous for simple things, they want a chance to be like them. Such discoveries this shows that there is a natural comfort in connecting behind phone screens than face-to-face, which in turn negatively affects how our generation develops and communicates with one another.

People are becoming more socially awkward because when they want to meet someone at a place and they don’t know anybody around they resort to look at their phone instead of talking to new people around them. From constantly looking down, people are slouching and losing confidence because they are looking down at their phone. Looking down at your phone and checking to see if you got any notifications and then seeing that there is nothing there affects your mood. The New York Times published a review of the effect of iPhone checking, concluding that the more you look down at your phone, the less confident and the more submissive you become. By looking at your smartphone, you’re making the tension worse (Hare 6). People think that if they look at their phones they won’t seem to awkward because they are doing something instead of just standing there. A study was done at the University of Auckland that those who slouched experienced significantly lower self-esteem and mood. Also, it was reported that higher levels of fear in uncomfortable social situations. The group that slouched voiced statements that were inherently more negative and less engaging than the group that stood up straight (Hare 5).

These two studies show that looking down at your phone can show a negative appearance making it seem you are not engaged in the conservation. Slouching causes mood, memory and behavior changes and makes it seem that you are less confident. The studies that whoever was the text case that slouch showed more of a negative side of the conservations. Confidence is the key thing to a good conservation and interaction with someone because it makes it seem you are engaged and respectful to the person you are talking to or who is speaking. While many of us spend hours every day using a device we increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and limiting our productivity from using phones.

Our relationship with our phones affects how we communicate and how we interact with people. People are not able to hold a conservation because the vocabulary is getting worse and people don’t know how to communicate or spell words because your phone can do everything for you. Many kids have lost the respect talking to someone that is older than them because they see on social media that its funny to make fun of someone that is older than them. Phones have ruin our face to face interactions with people because the thought of saying something over text is better than doing it face to face. Nowadays for many kids it's hard to hold a conservation because they don’t know what to talk about and can’t hold a conservation.

Emojis have become another reason that we have ruined our way of talking because we are hiding are emotions behind the screen. Since we have the ability to save as many numbers as possible in our phones there is no use to remember numbers because they are already saved into our phones. The cons of this is that if your phone died and the chance that there is no charger around or if someone stole your phone, you would have no one to contact because you do not have the access to refer back to your contacts. Overuse affects communication but also affects our interaction between our deeper relationships with people. This occurs because we like the idea of texting the person we are interested behind a screen instead of face to face. Tompkins states that “communication matters ethically because communication acts impact everyone involved in the process of communication”(Tompkins Pg. 13). Tompkins argues that practice communication because then we would know what to do in any situation that comes across. Communication is needed in everyday life because it fills the silence in the room.

Data

The Apple iPhone introduces the screen report on the iOS 12 update which allows people to see on average how long they are on their phone. This allows us to see how addicted we are to our phones. RescueTime: blog made the calculation that 11,000 users on average are on their phones 3 hours and 15 minutes a day. They made the research that people check their phones 58 times a day on average. Picking up your phone can cause a chain reaction because there are constantly notifications going off or the person just want to see if they got any notifications. When Apple released the weekly screen report people were shocked on average how long they are on their phones for.

Conclusion

Technology does allow individuals to avoid awkward situations if they want. The fact that it is so easy to avoid tough situations can be a bad and a good thing depending on what the situation is. When someone is forced to deal with one of these situations later on in life, they may not be able to hide behind their phone. A way to not hurt yourself when looking down on your phone is to keep your head up and shoulders back when looking at your phone, even if that means holding it at eye level.