Have you been feeling lonely recently? Yeh, me too. Must be the weather.
Spending all that time being busy on my cell messaging, phoning, tweeting, posting, arguing, browsing, counting calories and footsteps and watching the cutest dog videos — there was one where this little Westie walks on his back legs and oh, sorry. When the phone vibrates, we know it’s time to leave for the dentist. But first it must tell us the weather and play one of our fave songs.
You’d think with all this help and stimulation we’d feel fulfilled and in closer touch with family, friends and ourselves in this modern hi-tech age.
But no.
We’re not, according to some more social studies people. According to researchers at San Francisco State University, cellphone addiction is pretty much like opioid addiction. What a joke, right? Wait, I’ve got a call….
Okay, where was I, oh right, more academic eggheads trying to justify their white lab coats.
βThe behavioral addiction of smartphone use,” they say, “begins forming neurological connections in the brain in ways similar to how opioid addiction is experienced by people taking Oxycontin for pain relief β gradually.β
What a crock! We can stay focused on any subject at hand o, wait one, wife txtg BRB
And get this. They also say frequent social media use actually isolates us from real human contact and relationships.
They surveyed college students and — this is what they say anyway — they found that the heaviest smartphone users also happened to feel the most isolated and lonely. Well, maybe, if they were down to 12 percent and one bar.
Are u ready? Professors Erik Peper and Richard Harvey say this is largely because loneliness is an unanticipated consequence of fewer real face-to-face interactions with other people.
We’re burying ourselves in a form of absentee communication where body language and other important human signals can’t be interpreted — like rolling our eyes, winking, nodding, smiling, actually listening, which is too much work anyway.
Well, that is true in a way. Lots of misunderstandings in text msgs tnx 2 cryptic lingo, u kno. And we blame these thongs on auto-correct.
Peper and Harvey write that such steady stimulation is not good for the brain and takes up all the time for necessary relaxation and just plain thinking. Really? SMH How spsed to relax with so many emails to answer, Facebk to read and Instagram pix to Like? C’mon!
They point out that many of us are “semi-tasking,” that is, doing two or more things at the same time but only haf as will.
Sorry. Had to answer that text. My barber.
But the good news is, since we’re in 2018 and San Francisco State is in California and this mammoth mound of clueless millennials is moving through society, none of this addiction business is our own fault. Isn’t that great?! What I’m doing to myself is somebody else’s fault. FANtastic!!!
Namely big tech companies. We are merely victims of big tech, victims of their greed for profits. And we’re helpless to do anything about it.
They make us take the phone from our pocket, make us scroll steadily, make us click constantly, make us ignore friends and family in the same house. Not ignoring family. I text them upstairs all the time.
All this so tech biz can make billions of $$$ off our addiction, like if doctors got kickbacks from drug makers for prescribing addictive opioids to anyone with the slightest pain.
Someone should sue. Oops, gotta take this….
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