Modern technology can help people feel much closer to each other. In the old days, it would take weeks, if not months, for a letter to go across the country, and take days to travel to visit someone across the state. Even with a telephone, you could only talk to the person and hear their voice, not see them, or be able to know everything about them instantly.
But with smart phones, one can not only talk to someone by voice, they can see them by video, they can play games on them, take pictures, watch TV shows and movies, and learn about the news on the Internet. For people in their early 20s especially, they’ve grown up with having smart phones in their teens, and are used to carrying them around at all times. People in their late 20s grew up knowing people had cell phones, but they were the flip-phone kind, without the ability to do so many activities on it at once. And people in their 30s and older grew up without cell phones, and had to make do with pagers, or phones in their home. It’s an entirely different world nowadays.
But having a Smartphone, with all it can do, can be very addicting for people in their early 20s. It becomes so addicting, that they stop paying attention to what is going on around them. Everyone on a train, for example, is on a phone, instead of talking to each other. This addiction is so hard, people start to lose the ability to have close relationships, because we’re so used to just texting each other instead of talking. And the addiction is so strong, young people feel lost without their phones. This paper will take a look at how people in their early 20s are addicted to phones, how it affects them and their relationships, and how they can fight their addiction or prevent such.
First of all it is important to figure out the terms. The term “addiction” is not always used in scientific community, at least the World Health Organization (WHO, ND) recommends applying the term “Dependence Syndrome”. “Overuse” is another term which is sometimes applied to describe the situation.
It is a secret for nobody, that once the health of a human is damaged in the early age; it is much harder, if at all possible, to recover from the damage in the more mature age. Meanwhile, numerous researches have shown that people in their early twenties always overuse their smart phones, or, in other words, display symptoms of what is often referred to as addiction (Davey ET Davey, ND). This addiction is particularly dangerous and hard to be addressed because it is oftentimes not recognized as such. The people in their twenties suffering from this addiction oftentimes do not realize the dangers associated with this sort of overuse, and do not consider it as an overuse at first place (Roberts, ND). Moreover, it is oftentimes not recognized as a problem by their relatives. Meanwhile, the overuse of smart phones is known to have significant influence on human health. This refers to both psychological state and physical conditions. The problem regularly starts in the social field, and is basically limited to the social dimension only. This social problem provokes sleeping disorders, anxieties, eating disorders and, as a result, ends up causing a range o physiological problems (Thomée, ND).
A number of researches have explicitly shown, that a significant number of people in their early twenties cannot imagine their lives without smartphones, check them both immediately after getting up and before going to bed, they feel serious anxiety once having to do without smart phones for a longer period of time (Pedrero). This stands for significant health-related risks, associated with this addiction. Meanwhile, socio-psychological problems may appear to be not less important. Many of the people in their early twenties have been found to feel much more comfortable when communicating by means of their smart phones than in person. Normal interpersonal relations appear to be not an easy thing for a new generation. This may be a sign of entirely new order of thins in the world, while, on the other hand, as many researchers fear, this may be an unrecognized epidemic of very severe socio-psychological disorder. Unfortunately, it is uneasy to predict the results of this disorder.
Lopez-Fernandez, along with a number of other scholars, make a point saying, that the problem is faced by teenagers first. However, with the people in their early twenties the situation is even more serious. They still remain in the high risk group for Smartphone addiction, however they have just left the protectorate of their parents, they are not controlled by them any longer, while in many cases they are not yet married, and thus appear to face the problem one-to-one. This is why it is particular important to raise the awareness about the problem among the people in their late teens and early twenties to help them prevent or manage the problem of Smartphone overuse.
The people in teir twenties are responsible for managing the problem of smartphone addiction. But it is the responsibility of the society to inform their new generation about the new dangerous addiction, which they may face. Full information needs to be provided to all the people of respective age, and this will allow them to take proper preventive and interventional measures or address a specialist if things have gone too far. This will help them avoid significant health related problems and socio-psychological disorders.
