We are all familiar with this feeling: when you do that one action of pure stupidity that ends in the destruction of your iPhone—the world’s easiest phone to break. Last weekend I experienced the lovely incident of accidentally dropping my phone in a frat house toilet. I left my phone in my back pocket (not a good place to leave it), and before I knew it I heard a loud curplunk and saw my life sitting in the bottom of the toilet.
What am I going to do?! How will I text? What about all of my reminders on my calendar? What about my alarms? What about my music to listen to at the gym? How will I call my parents without being annoying and borrowing my friends’ phones all the time?? These questions all soared through my head as I stared at my iPhone, mystically shining at the bottom of this frat house’s porcelain throne.
My mental breakdown made me think of an interesting concept: is it sad that I am this upset about breaking my phone? I thought of my parents, and their parents, and all the generations before us that didn’t rely on having cellular phones for communication. Although this was rumored to be an “easier time,” I respect our generation’s technological agility, with both cell phones and the Internet at large, and think that it will prove to be a valuable tool for our future success.
Here are the advantages to having technology on our side:
1. We are more organized
Technology allows us to take multiple tasks and compartmentalize them all into one place. With a few taps on our iPhones, we can be arranging our daily schedule with the “Calendar” app, making to-do list’s on the “Notes” app, managing our bank accounts through online banking apps such as “Chase” or “Bank of America,” and collecting all of our photos and videos through the “Photo” app.
2. We are extremely efficient
With iPhones and their abundant “apps,” users can keep in contact with their peers by texting and messaging, organizing our schedules through the calendar, checking our Instagrams, updating our twitters, scrolling through Facebook, and listening to music all in the matter of minutes. We also have email at the tips of our fingers, and are able to respond to our professors almost instantly. Our skillful abilities to type also allow us to create complex, professional emails all from our cellphones while grabbing some lunch.
3. We are globally connected
Being a college kid away at school, I sometimes find it hard to stay updated with news stories, as I don’t have a newspaper delivery subscription or cable available in my room. However, with my cellphone, I get updates from major sources like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in real time as the stories are coming out. I also have multiple online subscriptions that allow me to navigate through the Internet and handpick the stories I would like to read.
4. We are environmentally friendly
Having the Internet as a source of information and a source of reference helps us save countless pages of paper. We aid environmental efforts through reading newspapers and books online or on the “iBooks” app, using our organizers electronically rather than on paper, printing fewer pictures, and writing fewer letters. Additionally, our education is now focused around many technological tools that save both energy and paper. The website we use, Moodle, allows us to electronically upload papers, receive grades, and submit rewrites flawlessly without printing a single page. Professors can also scan excerpts from books and post them on the website so we may reference them and take notes entirely online.
5. We are able to stay focused through distraction
A recent report came out saying that students who study with some distractions end up performing better on tests than students who study with no distractions. I know at first this can seem counterintuitive, but dig a little deeper. The students who have their cell phones out while studying learn to control distractions and ignore them if necessary. The students who don’t have cell phones or other distractions are unable to ignore the interruptions in a testing environment and therefore are thrown off.
I know that many groups of people complain about teenagers being on their phones too much or being addicted to the Internet. I can acknowledge that our “addiction” to technology can definitely have some downsides, such as a lack of interpersonal communication skills. Granted, some teenagers and young adults spend too much time attached to their cell phones or laptops, and that is something we must work on. However, I do not think our attachment and appreciation of technology is completely detrimental. We can look forward to a time when the rest of society catches up with us technologically, and we will be unstoppable.