How Smartphones Affect Real Life Communication: Research Paper

Introduction

The 21st century has taken a new shift. Everybody is inconstant communication with their subconscious mind, persuading them, moving them, and causing them to act in a particular way. Without the discovery and use of rhetoric and its many devices, advertising and visual communication would be almost impossible. When a person walks into any room, there are crickets. The room is not empty as one could think. As a matter of fact the room is quite full. The people in the room staring down into their glowing smartphone screens, dark circles under their eyes, fully engaged in a fantasyland because real world is quite "unsocial". Nowadays, people`s fingers are flying furiously across their touch screens while longing for communication inside a box. The power of the digital connection makes one to send a message with the click of a send button to the digital stratosphere. The message then bounces off to a communication tower before landing to the recipient's smartphone. The recipient will then cherish the well-thought out idea forever. Without the message box active, a person will be considered lonely. The reason is because people around the person are also in their own communication box in wait for notification. According to , smartphone communication are deeply hardwired to people`s brain such that would malfunction. In the digital edge, smartphones have radical effects on how people are and how they relate to others.

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Nayak (2013) points out that there are roughly 6.8 billion subscriptions to a mobile phone service, and there are about seven billion people on this planet. The number is a huge one to wrap up in one`s head. In every household it will not be hard to find a family member in possession with a smartphone. One likely place would be deep in the Amazon where an aboriginal tribe do not use a mobile phone. Smartphones are not only use for sending and receiving information but also provide services like surfing the internet. The internet in this case offers a plethora of entertainment options which explains why people a seriously engrossed on the smartphones. A single smartphone makes a call while a person texts, plays video game, social media engagement, listen to music and at most read a book online or offline while doing this processes. Smartphones have made the epitome of multitasking to be on the next level.

Points that, there is a problem with the usage of smartphones. He argues that in a technical society people are likely to miss out the best things in right that are just a look away. People are so dependent on their smart phones such that they miss what the real world society communicates to them. An illustration of this can be understood when the traffic lights are green but you see a screen lighting to the drivers face obviously because he or she is not concentration on the road. People are so extroverted with smartphones such that they act tough, say obnoxious things in a message board but have nothing to share when you meet them physically. These people are so timid in real life and could speak nothing to somebody`s face the way they do on the messaging board with the help of smartphones.

Speaking og the truth. Suppose you are in a meeting, seminar or a forum and someone is busy flying their fingers on the smart phones. One would think the person is so attentive in taking notes because the person cares. To your surprise, the person is very far away communicating with other people who are not present. The mobile phone is not used for taking notes. There is a reason why there is a pen and slate in real life to help in taking notes. The person is in a fantasyland with their smart phone.

Everyday people are lost in the array of sending and receiving digital messages. Why are people so carried away to a fantasyland and prefer to leave the real moment they live in? Why is the society missing out on real world scenarios nowadays? The society is deeply sharing experiences with virtual people yet it can hared real experiences within where it operates. Life as we know has good and bad moments. The engagement of smartphone creates a dull atmosphere in every aspect where social interactions was cherished.

In every meeting occasion each person has their own agenda. Despite what the goal is, it should be achieved. In case there is a plan to be set and one wants people to be on the sme page, some of the people in the room will be carried away. There is a guy or a girl with a smart phone who is deep into fantasyland. While the person is carried away, the organizer of the meeting will be questioning themselves how t=rude the person is to use their smartphone. No single person would want to be the person who deprives people's phones. If one wants things to be done the right way, all tactics must be employed to stop smart phone usage in the meeting. This leads to court thesis state that the usage of smart phones has radically affected who people are and what they do.

Literature Review

As the Internet has grown and become something majority of individuals in society have access to on a regular basis people have begun to exponentially increase the use of smart phone communication through the Internet, whether it is from email, instant messaging, social networking or some other medium. The increase is because of the convenience of being able to interact with someone else with little effort. A person can simply type a quick message to someone that they can respond to in their leisure, instead of having to meet up with each other. Nancy K. Baym, Yan Bing Zhang and Mei-Chen Lin, all Assistant or Associate Professors at their respective schools departments of Communication Studies, explain how this can hinder the quality of a relationship between people. "For example, Kraut et al. (1998) argued that poorer quality, weak-tie, internet social relationships may be substituted for better (i.e. face-to-face) relationships, or that time spent online might otherwise be spent forming strong-tie (i.e. face-to-face) relationships. Both perspectives set the internet in juxtaposition to, and competition with, a world of strong, deep, rewarding face-to-face relationships. Nie et al. claimed that 'virtual contact may be more superficial than that which occurs in more personal settings', and that email 'appears to imply an obvious tradeoff between quantity and quality of social interaction' (2002: 238)." (Baym) The basis of this that when someone uses the Internet to communicate with someone else there is a sacrifice of the quality of the conversation in exchange for ease and the sheer quantity of how many times you can communicate. They also suggest that to build better relationships people have to frequently interact with one another in-person instead of constantly communicating using the Internet. The people who are interacting with each other would have more difficulties when it comes to conveying emotions to one another. It also creates a certain disconnect from each other because the people are unable to see how one another are initially reacting to the things and because of the time elapsed between response that would not normally be there in real face-to-face interactions.

Communication through the Internet also breaks several common unspoken rules of normal in-person social interactions. "Focus instead on the absence of recourse online for offensive personal behavior. Sure, there are virtual communities from which you can be 'banished; or in which you can be 'punished.' But without any real-world consequences, there is a lack of individual accountability that is inimical to the creation of enduring communal bonds." (Shapiro) Many people when they are communicating online anonymously, whether it is a chat or a forum, will say things that they know would not normally be socially acceptable. If it were not for the anonymity of interactions throught the Internet most people would refrain from saying some of the rude and offensive things that are posted because of the fear of possible ramifications.

People who socialize via the Internet also do not usually have a sense of connection to the people that they are conversing with because of the difficulty to make any personal bond with someone else solely through online social networking. For this reason many people feel that their peers that they are speaking with online are disposable and that at anytime they can join a new site, forum, or chat at the slightest sign of dissatisfaction with a current group. "...[P]eople can exit effortlessly. As Esther Dyson writes in Release 2.0, ' people who don't like the rules can leave.' This is perhaps the most distinct feature of these groups: The ease and convenience of online interaction meas that the cost or hassle involved in switching from one to the next is negligible...it is this very ability to break ties that makes virtual communities ersatz imitators of the real thing." (Shapiro) Since online interactions are not at an authentic representation of real societies, some people will become accustomed to breaking the social norms that are regularly disregarded in Internet communities such as refraining from being rude and offensive to people or not abandoning social groups that you are a part of, and they will begin to unconsciously breaking them during in-person interactions. The Internet is not the only type of technological advancement that has been negatively effecting social interactions over the years.

People still converse a lot in public, but often their conversations are interrupted by one or more of the people involved receiving a phone call or a text message and responding to it during that time. This usually creates a disconnect between the people in the and the conversation at hand and causes the other person in the conversing to feel as though they have been abandoned by the whomever they were speaking with. Lee Humphreys, an assistant professor at Cornell University, has done studies to observe the effects that answering a phone call could have during a conversation. "If the person did answer the cellphone and engage in a new exclusive interaction, the former With often exhibited some anxiety or annoyance at becoming a 'Single'. It was possible to observe new Singles engaging in a number of activities to alleviate some of the vulnerability and unease. These include reading a menu or a book, drinking their water or coffee, eating their food, looking out the window, studying the scrabble board, looking at other people and playing with their own cellphones." (Humphreys) The study shows that if two or more people are engaging in a conversation and any of them answers their phone during the conversation, it creates and awkward situation for the other person, in which the person usually begins to engage in a trivial activity to pass the time, like reading the menu if they are at a restaurant. This happens because the person is basically being put on hold and does not want to start doing something else, such as starting a conversation with another person, because they feel like they are obligated to the original conversation that they were having.

Another reason for people doing this that they want to give the person on the phone their space to talk to whomever is on the phone in privacy. "A person might want to help create a 'private space' in which his partner can have a conversation. By engaging in distracting activities such as reading a menu, it gives the impression that one is not eavesdropping on the cellphone conversation." (Humphreys) Most people do this as a way to be polite or considerate by not interrupting someone while they are conversing on the phone with someone else. While some people feel that when someone answers a phone call during a conversation that they must be courteous by giving that person their space, others are...