We are now in the age of which people have at least one smartphone or tablet and this makes some people not paying attention to their surroundings or absent-minded because of contents in smartphone or tablet. What scary is even when crossing the street, these people are still staring at the screen of their smartphone or tablet rather than being careful of cars which may hit them. Sometimes, signal was given but these people don’t see it because the most important thing is interaction in cyber world not interaction with the reality. Some even stopped having interactions with the things around them.
We must admit that communication via these devices is not the same as face-to-face communication. We may have a lot of friends in Facebook or Lines but in the reality we may not able to talk to others when going to or visiting any public places. Having friends in social media does not mean that you indeed have friends. This is because a social skill called “face to face” coomunication requires eyes contact and verbal conversation. Some people may be very terrible at their speaking skill as they may feel nervous when talking to others, feel awkward when approaching to others, don’t know how to behave or have issue in selection of words or language in each situation. This is because language used in social networks is totally different and when it comes to formal language; these people don’t know how to speak correctly and appropriately.
Mobile phone can be treated as a relaxing device if it is used for only entertainment not for any learning purpose. It would be useless if we do not maximize the use of mobile phone which could help us communicate for mutual understanding with others. If we only focus on entertainment contents, it will waste our time as there is no any useful learning. It may also get worse if we are targeted by a group of people who try to get benefit from us by using social networks as their tool. This is because these people are very good at hacking our information and taking advantage when we feel insecure resulting in negative or bad consequences to us.
Resolution
We must reduce frequency in using mobile phone such as when at home, we should not play mobile phone all the time or when in overseas we must turn off internet signal and spend more time with our family. Some even says that turning off the mobile phone may be good for health. If we continue to change our habit in reducing the use of the mobile phone, we may find some new things to do (not carrying mobile phone all the time).
For those who are heavily addicted to mobile phone, the advice is to rearrange your time and limit time for playing games or chatting including finding new activities to draw your attention away from mobile phone otherwise when having free time, you may think of playing games in mobile phone for killing time. But if you have any new activity, you can kill your free time by not playing mobile phone.
I, as the writer, myself is also one of those people who are addicted to social networks. So after reviewing myself with the above resolution methods, I have tried to spend my time less and less with tablet or smartphone and find other new activities (away from tablet or smartphone). For example, I used to stay overnight for browsing internet via my mobile phone but now I have tried to do painting and playing a piano instead. I feel this way helped me not to obsess with smartphone or tablet.