Walking the halls of MATC, you can hardly go 50 feet without seeing someone with a cellphone. Last week I saw one girl next to an outlet with her laptop plugged in and open, but she wasn’t paying attention to that, but rather her phone. Benches in hallways are filled with students on their phones. I ride the bus and when you get on, all you see are people with their heads down, staring at their phones. Why are our cellphones so important to us?

Perhaps because it’s more than just a way to communicate, it’s our lives. It has our schedules, the time, texting capabilities, all different kinds of apps, and it even has, believe it or not, the power to make phone calls. Astonishing in this day and age since most people text and don’t call anymore. Also, texting has made us lazy spellers. Autocorrect will help you spell or we use abbreviations for everything.

If you misplace your phone, you go crazy looking for it. I know, that when I misplace my phone, I’m frantic to find it, be it to look something up on Google, see the time, or check when the next bus is coming. If I don’t have my phone, I feel naked.

Not only are students on their phones in the hallways, but in class too. Teachers are teaching and students are texting. When do we say enough is enough? When I’m talking with friends, it drives me nuts when they are on their phones. It’s so rude when you are trying to have a real-life conversation and they are staring at their phones. And then they ask me to repeat myself. Now mind you, I am to blame for many of these things as well, but I try to listen to people when they are talking to me and not look at my phone.

With all the apps that smartphones offer, your phone is a hotbed of goings-on. You can check your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter accounts. You can check your email! You can even check the weather. When you have your smartphone, you have the world at your fingertips. I often find myself, walking down the street, not even paying attention to where I’m walking. I keep telling myself that one of these days I’m going to hurt myself. I’ve seen some close calls with others doing similar things. They’ve almost run into poles, or worse, in front of cars. We need to be careful when texting.

Another negative effect from cellphones is texting and driving. According to the National Safety Council, there are 1,600,000 traffic accidents per year from texting while driving alone. That’s nearly 25% of all car accidents! It’s six times more likely to cause an accident than driving intoxicated. It’s even against the law in Wisconsin. According to the Wisconsin DMV, if you must use your cellphone, it’s safer to pull over and stop in a safe area to make your call.

All this screen time isn’t good for you either. I’ve heard that looking at your cellphone or computer screen before going to bed is not good for your circadian rhythm, which basically means it messes up your sleep cycle. The light from the screen tricks your body into thinking it’s daylight, and that you should be awake.

Recently I was reading a book, and it was talking about how we respond to text messages.  We know that everyone has their cellphone on them at all times so when someone doesn’t respond to us right away after sending a text message, we start to freak out. We wonder why they aren’t responding. Is it something we said? Or has something happened to them? Why aren’t they texting back? In today’s world we expect instant gratification and that is exactly what cellphones give us. They allow us to have knowledge, entertainment and communication right at our fingertips.

Cellphones can be good for all those reasons, but I’d like to see us go back to the basics every once in awhile.

Wouldn’t it be novel if people put down their cellphones and spoke to one another face to face?