The Effect Of Cellphone Usage On Society

In the eighties, when the mobile phone made its first appearance, it was a bulky gadget that let you talk while you walked. It was a gadget only the rich could afford. Today, almost everybody wields one, and it is the one gadget that has scaled all boundaries of gender, race and age.

A host of features like appointment scheduling, faxing, emailing, net surfing, video and music functions have made the cell phone more than its predecessor the humble mobile phone. You can play games on it; use it as a diary, as a calculator and an alarm clock. It is a pocket-sized wonder that is capable of doing so much more than its size implies. The mobile phone’s prime use remains to be able -to talk while you walk, to be able to stay in touch wherever you are — in a traffic jam, on an escalator or even when you are in the bathroom. Cell phones have made it possible to report accidents and mishaps on the highways within seconds of their happening. Parents can keep track of their children and for the elderly, help is no longer an arduous ambulatory journey to the land line but, just a finger touch away.

When you see a couple walking down the beach, hand in hand, other hand holding the phone to their respective ears talking to others when they should be talking to each other, you know that the cell phones have quietly taken over our lives and robbed of us of our private moments. No matter where you are, you can’t get away from them. In the trains, in the buses, everywhere you go someone is yelling on a mobile phone. Worse still, you have a generation of youth with headphones attached to their cell phones walking on roads oblivious to the honking of motorists. Motorists riding while speaking on the cell phone and people ‘texting’ each other while driving are the worst.

Cell phones have become an obsession. If we are not careful, the most important minutes of our life might pass us by simply because we were too busy ‘texting’. Technology is meant to simplify our life, not enslave us, so use it accordingly.