Social media mobs strike again as Youth PCC Paris Brown resigns

The Tethered Self - Reflection

 For one day, thousands of people across the world took part in one experiment - tracking their mobile phone habits for 24-hours and documenting their general usage and interaction with Social Networks through it. This is my account...

 

Wherever I go, people constantly are on their phones. Bleeps, zings and whacky ringtones surround me, as people relentlessly update their Facebook status, latest tweet and Blackberry message. And I must ashamedly admit that I want to be a part of that. 

How long do you spend on your mobile phone each day?

/ Johan Larsson

The desire to look up a word I've never heard, research someone in a lecture amongst other things plague me. Stories could be shared online, along with amusing anecdotes.

But despite having a rather recently produced mobile, I'm deprived of the internet.

Irrespective of this, my phone rarely is unattached from my hand. Fiddling with the cover, swinging it around whilst fidgeting; I can't help but find my phone is anchoring me down.

Sometimes it takes me a number of days to reply to texts, simply for the fact that I'm constantly reminding myself of the need to live life rather than being imprisoned in front of my HTC screen.

Our mobile habits are unorthodox and there will always something better we should be doing. But it feels like the pieces of metal, plastic and complex micro-technology are a part of our existence now.

And to be without a phone at your fingertips is to make yourself socially unavailable and almost anti-social. Yet avid users ironically find themselves outcasts due to living in an online and telephonic world that deprives them of real conversation in this big ball of water, earth and uncountable inhabitable planet that we should live within. 

Social networking through Blackberrys, iPhones, HTCs amongst countless others only promoting this 'cut off' behaviour, where people spend more time before their 'social' hub than they do living in the real world.