Cellphones In A Public Place

The use of cellphones in a public place has ruined the social aspect of leaving home and adventuring out into the public. “A train station is no longer a communal space, but a place of social collection: tethered selves come together, but do not speak to each other. Each person at the station is more likely to be having an encounter with someone miles away than the person in the next chair” (Turkle 122). People want the privacy of home, in public spaces. When venturing out into the public men and women alike will use his or her phone has a way to avoid talking to strangers “Indeed, the presence of our tethering media [signals] that we do not want to be disturbed by conventional sociality with physically proximate individuals” (Turkle 122).

Emily Esfahani Smith describes this change as “A further consequence of our culture becoming more individualistic over the last two hundred years is that it has also—disturbingly— become more self-absorbed” (401). The biggest advancements that have been made over the last two hundred years have happened in science and technology. There is a strong connection between the use of cellphones and people becoming self-absorbed. People are worrying too much about how they appear online, how many likes their newest selfie got, and if their follower count went down. Unless they see someone else’s story online, they will not care about what happened to that other person. Simon Kuper from FT.com agrees with Smith; he writes “‘Psychologists have found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000’” (qtd. in “Smartphones”). Before cellphones if someone saw a fight taking place they would intervene and break up the fight, but in the age of cellphones it is more likely for someone to stop and record the fight to put on social media. People do not care about one another anymore, they would rather avoid any situations that could be happening around them by the use of their

According to Dictionary.com refuge is “anything to which one has recourse for aid, relief, or escape”. It is clear that adults take refuge in their phones in public situations, but the scene described above is a child taking refuge in his or her phone at home. Children should be able to take refuge in their parents. Cellphones are damaging the delicate relationship between child and parent. If children learn at a young age to take refuge in their phone, then when the children are older and have serious problems they will not be able to speak comfortably to their parents. Some may say that technology has brought us closer together, “The presence of the cell phone, which has a special ring if my daughter calls, keeps me on alert all day” (Turkle 122). Cellphones do allow for constant connection to family members in the case of emergency, but people have become too attached to their cellphones. One television producer, accustomed to being linked to the world via her cell and Palm device, revealed that for her, the Palm’s inner spaces were where her self resides: “When my Palm crashed it was like a death. It was more than I could handle. I felt as though I had lost my mind.” (qtd. in Turkle