There was a period in our lives when we actually talked to our friends at lunch, in the hallways, and in class. We made eye contact and held conversations about anything that we felt concerned us. We laughed and smiled in real time, face-to-face.
These days seem to have passed us by. Now, people are glued to their phones as they sluggishly parade down the hallway, bumping into passers-by without the decency to say “excuse me.” As they chow down their lunches, they scroll through feeds, refraining from conversation with the surrounding 400 students in the cafeteria. And perhaps most annoyingly, when stuck in social situations when there are not immediate best friends to make small talk with, they turn to their phones, choosing to go through Instagram pictures and Twitter accounts instead of making new friends.
It isn’t the actual phone use that is a problem; it is the manner in which the phone is used. People are typically not texting their mothers how much they love them or Googling more efficient ways to study. Instead, they are scrolling through tweets or over-edited photos that they have seen countless times before. Apps like Pinterest and Wanelo become places to occupy time and look at a myriad of pages containing similarly themed ideas. Please, peers, stalk people on your own time. Online shop on your own time. Use school for educational and social interaction.
Some call phone overuse a coping mechanism; others claim that to be “bored” and thus feel the need to be glued to their phones every waking hour.
Either way, it’s rude and cowardly. It is not horribly difficult to put your phones away and stop by your friends lockers to ask them how their days are going, while simultaneously improving traffic conditions in the school. People could use their eyes to watch the halls instead of their twitter feeds (and senior rail would no longer be the most crowded four way intersection in all of NOVA).
And about the Wi-Fi: we get that it is patchy and somewhat unreliable. But does that really matter? How many times do the complaints occur while using a school computer for school use? It seems that bad Wi-Fi is only a problem when the YouTube video of a singing cat buffers for too long.
So WS students, from one group of phone-overusers to another, let’s start talking to each other face-to-face. It’s a novel concept, we know. But Twitter and Instagram can wait.