When walking down the sidewalk today, individuals might as well be naked because everyone is so fixated on looking at their smartphones that no one would notice. Evan Downey, a senior at Cabrini University, noticed this in the world around him and decided to change it. “I deleted social media because I caught myself with the need to check various sites multiple times a day,” Downey said. “It was disconnecting me from the real world.”
This generation has been nicknamed the generation of zombies due to the dead behaviors you see on the subway, walking down the street or passing acquaintances in the hallways.
Spending a great amount of time scrolling through social media apps and communicating to people through a handheld computer has become a common theme across the adolescent community. Throughout history, tales have been told of a member of a neighborhood really connecting and knowing their neighbors well and not only knowing what trips they took this year and how many friends or followers they have.
The idea of asking your neighbors or family members for directions or help on a subject is not that outdated. Only 10 years ago, you could see people confiding in others for information but with the rapid advancement in technology, that is no longer the case.
There is a study on the effects on trust of neighbors with an indirect correlation with gaining information from a smartphone. Indirect in this case meaning that as the amount of information gained from a phone increases, the amount of trust in neighbors decreases.
The main culprit of today’s lack of social interaction is the lack of true communication in the form of holding a conversation with someone. “I would give my neighbor’s advice a try at first, and if that did not work I would look it up on Google,” Downey said.
According to a poll on Twitter, with a following base of mostly individuals ranging from 18 to 23 years of age, 83 percent would take out their smartphone if they were lost in the city. Not only would they whip out their smartphone and google directions, they would rather this tactic over asking a local that may know a better way to get to your destination.
Within that same poll, 83 percent say that they use their phone for more than four hours of the day. If a person is awake for 12 hours in a day, that is at least one third of their day spent looking at a small screen in their hands. Downey was among the outliers (not included in the Twitter poll) that said he uses his phone for about an hour a day.
This information could prove the findings of the study mentioned earlier, that since he uses his phone less than most, he would trust the advice of a neighbor until given a reason not to.
