Shocking Statistics

"Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.” - Steven Speilberg

    In less you live under a rock or you’re just quite frankly wrong, you probably think that the world spends a whole lot of time staring down at a screen. I certainly thought that everyone I knew spent way too much time on their screens wasting away their amazing potential to do amazing things. But me? I never considered myself a big consumer of screen time: games, social media, and the like. Then came iOS 12.

    I installed iOS 12 on my iPhone a little over a week ago and it absolutely rocked my world. If you don’t have an iPhone, haven’t installed iOs 12, or have installed it and just haven’t played around with it, it has this super disturbing feature which keeps track of your total screen time and your average time in different categories of apps. I didn’t pay much attention to it until I got a notification at the end of my first week with the update and saw my average screen time. I nearly fell out of my chair. 

    Apparently, on that particular Saturday, which I had excused as a lazy day after a very long week, something that I had without a doubt earned, I had spent over SIX HOURS on my phone alone. There is a fine line between a lazy day and just flat out being a useless bum. While the time was significantly less on school nights, it was still exponentially more than what I would have guessed. 

    Technology has its benefits. I’ve gone to six different schools over my career and I don’t know what I would do without some of the people that I have been able to keep in touch with because of email, text, and conversations over FaceTime in my life. I’m also taking the Bible in 90 days challenge right now, and there’s no way I would be able to do it if I couldn’t read some of those chapters over the screen. Eric Shmidt says that "There were five exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization and 2003, but that much information is now created every two days." (There is some controversy behind this quote, but I believe it still serves to illustrate my point.) Obviously, it has brought us to incredible places. I’d go as far as to say that it is essential to our success as a society right now, simply put, we need our screens. 

    However, I would venture so far as to say that if not used scarcely and for the right purposes we would be infinitely better throwing our phones in the ocean. The reasons for this are quite hackneyed; you could probably recite them yourself, but I’m going to go through them anyway and hopefully add some incite because they are integral to understanding the simple point I’m trying to make. 

- You’ll notice that as our phones get smaller, cooler, and more useful, we as human beings get bigger and less useful. It’s no coincidence that with the unprecedented rise in technology over the past half-century that there has been an unprecedented decline in human health and a rise in obesity. My generation is the first generation in recorded HISTORY to have a shorter life expectancy than the generation to come before us. I certainly won’t say that our smartphones, televisions, and computers are solely responsible for our physical health decline, but if you spend six hours on your phone, that’s six hours you aren’t outside getting fresh air and good exercise. 

- We don’t even know how to socialize. It’s not even a problem of "we’re so distracted with our phones that we don’t socialize," it’s a problem of "we’re so distracted with our phones that we don’t even know how." I believe there was a time when kids said sir and ma'am and please and thank you and certainly wouldn’t stoop so low as to call their teachers “dude.” (One or more teachers at our school may or may not be livid about this chronic and recurring problem.)

- And then there is the problem. We aren’t building relationships. This generation, in particular, has had a wall pulled over their eyes to believe that the best thing to make a habit is this screens. There is nothing to them more fun than playing on phones, video games, social media, that is the best activity because they don’t know any different. They think of course, that they can build relationships that way. The average Facebook user has 338 Facebook friends. And you should watch my brother FaceTime his friends! They call and then they sit down and play XBox for two hours until one of them has to go and then they hang up and no one has to say a word. I think that if we realized how fun it is to actually get to know human beings and make friends, not based on a cute picture of their sleeping cat or what they had for dinner last night, but on who they are. Relationships aren’t being built because of our screens that we spend so long on; the saddest thing is, this generation (and even older generations as we get more and more attracted to our smartphones and other devices) doesn’t even know how wonderful and rewarding those real relationships can be. 

- It’s addicting. You hear the phone ding and you will leave any activity under the sun to go find out who texted you. Don’t deny it. You do it just like I do it. And there’s nothing like being in a good rhythm, rolling through the quadratics like they’re nothing, finally understanding it, and then having the phone ring, and forgetting every ounce of progress you’ve made. Because you certainly can’t say no. 

The simplest way I can put it is this: it comes down to your legacy. It says in scripture that “man may live seventy years, eighty if strength prevails.” How you use those eighty years is up to you. If you want to spend time staring at your screen and finding out what your “friends” are having for dinner, no one will try to stop you. But I firmly believe that supplanting time spent with friends and family, and time working hard to make a difference in the world you are loosing and the world around you is loosing. 

You probably don’t think you’re spending too much time on your screen. I certainly didn’t. But be very careful with that kind of thinking because you can blink and find yourself spending a Saturday watching reruns of Gordon Ramsay shows. Be very careful. Life is short guys, what you do matters. We need to be building relationships, working hard, all of these things and not getting distracted by our screens. Put them away. I don’t mean shove it in your pocket until you get another text. Turn that thing off and don’t just toss it, chuck it into the ocean. Don’t look at me like I’m a frog. Do it. 

Works Cited

Smith, Kit. “47 Incredible Facebook Statistics and Facts.” Brandwatch, Brandwatch, 5 Mar. 2018, www.brandwatch.com/blog/47-facebook-statistics/.

Moore, Robert J. “Eric Schmidt's ‘5 Exabytes’ Quote Is a Load of Crap.” The Data Point, 25 Sept. 2014, blog.rjmetrics.com/2011/02/07/eric-schmidts-5-exabytes-quote-is-a-load-of-crap/.