The Pros And Cons Of Mobile Phones

“Mobile phones making the world smaller than a village,” states Ericsson Telecommunication Company (as cited in Vutagwa, 2013). Throughout past centuries, people had limited ways of communication. They used letters and birds to communicate which can take months or years to be delivered, depends on the distances. This is how people communicated, until Alexander Graham Bell introduced the telephone to the world in 1876. The first telephone was big and heavy and was mainly used by the government. Nowadays, more than 6 billion people in the world own either a mobile phone or a smartphone. The smartphone is a technology which made many people get overly attached to it that they cannot do without it. Most of these people do not actually need a smartphone.

Assistant professor of psychiatry in the UF College of Medicine, Lisa Merlo (as cited in Birdwell, 2007), states: “Although cellar phones and personal digital assistants such as BlackBerry were created to make modern life more convenient, they’re actually beginning to interfere in the lives of users who don’t know when to turn them off.” To put it another way, even though modern technologies were made just to make our life easier, we are actually more attached to it now. A study used in the University of Florida says that people cannot be out of touch even in the movie (as cited in Birdwell, 2007). April Birdwell, College of Medicine Science writer and editor, shows in her article “Addicted to Phones?” (2007) how a growing number of people have serious phone problems and how people with phone addiction will feel anxious when they cannot check their phones. Unlike drugs or alcohol addiction, it is difficult to pinpoint phone addiction, since nearly every person in the world has a phone. To sum up, phones weaken society by creating citizens too busy to leave their mobiles to participate in

Communication has changed in the past few years thanks to technology, now we have social media in our smartphones, which made the world much smaller. In “Don’t Fear the Network: The Internet Is Changing the Way We Communicate for the Better,” Seth Masket (2014), a political scientist at the University of Denver, states that, we no longer have to be in homes, offices or cafes to stay in touch with people. In other words, social media have strengthened our relationships with others. For instance, anyone with a smartphone could be connected to other countless smartphone owners across the world by using social media (Masket, 2014). So, people who oppose the idea of mobile phones making a weak or society may claim that mobile phones are actually making us connected to the