Going 31 hours without a cell phone was actually a lot easier than I was expecting. I went home on Saturday so I decided to leave my phone at school while I was gone. Typically when I don’t have my phone with me I feel a little anxious, and I was tempted to bring it with me “just in case”. Having my cell phone with me makes me feel more secure because I know that if I do really need to contact someone, I’m able to. But while cell phones are nice and can be extremely helpful, I think it’s good to take a break from them every once in a while. This isn’t the first time I’ve purposely left my cell phone at school while I went home for the weekend; sometimes I just want to be away from people at school and not even have the option of being in contact with them. Granted, it’s always just for one night so it’s not too hard to do, but it’s still a nice break, and not having my cell phone with me made my weekend a lot more relaxing. I think the key factor in my experience was that I went home, because if I had stayed on campus it would have been a hell of a lot harder for me to go without a phone. I depend on it a lot when I make plans with people, and also to call my parents, but since I wasn’t making plans with anyone and I was with my parents, I really didn’t have a need for it. I do think that people are often too dependent on their phones and waste a lot of time talking/texting on them about unimportant things, but they are still communicating with other people, so in comparison to other technology, cell phones are hardly destructive to social capital at all. In fact, some people believe that cell phones are actually bringing people together and helping them communicate. I do think that cell phones are reducing actual human interaction because people are too involved in what they're doing on their phone to talk to the people that are actually with them, but phones definitely do make it easier to get in touch with people. I noticed that I talked to my parents a lot more than I have other times at home when I've been texting most of the time, but since I left my phone at school to avoid having to talk to anyone, clearly my phone is a major tool for communication.
-Grayson
I liked your experiment and what you learned from it. You are a wise one. We could all use a little break from the web of communications we are caught in!
ReplyDeleteit seems everyone who has done this lab has come out of it the same way.
ReplyDeletethey enjoyed the hours spent without technology weighing them down, which is awesome.