Within the past few years, social media has had hundreds of positive and negative impacts on society around the world. Unfortunately for a lot of people, social media has made some feel alone, isolated, and or more antisocial than usual in 2024.

Like most people, I have an Iphone. I currently own an Iphone 12, and the first phone I received was in 3rd grade. I believe it was an Iphone Eight. I had an Ipad at the time too so I didn’t use my phone as much, but throughout my years of middle school and high school, I feel that I became more and more addicted to my phone; I used it more often.

There are thousands of ways your phone can make you addicted to it.

One example of an addictive app on your phone is the mobile app called TIkTok.

TIkTok has a large platform with millions of users who use the app everyday, and if you own TIkTok like me, you’d understand that you can get a lot of notifications throughout the day. The notifications from TikTok contain things like when someone likes your comment, people that liked your TikTok posts, and notifications of people liking the same videos you reposted. When someone likes your video on TikTok, you’ll receive a notification on your phone that someone has liked your video.

Most of the notifications you receive from TikTok are sometimes used as a way to get you back on your phone. If you think about it, your phone will ring a lot when someone likes a video, or reposts it.

Phone notifications are one of the main reasons why people are on their phone all the time. Phone notifications are really good at drawing your attention.

When I go to school and sit down at lunch, the amount of people I see on their phones, rather than socializing with others, is sometimes concerning to me. In my opinion, I believe that lunch is a place to socialize with people; to have meaningful and fun conversations with your friends. When I see a table of students looking down at their cellular devices, rather than communicating to the people right in front of them, I simply find that interesting.

Sometimes when I sit by myself at lunch, or with my friends, I heavily feel the pressure to get on my phone. 

Since there’s no people around me to talk to, or im just simply bored with my friends, I head to my phone as a source of distraction, rather than getting up to sit with a larger group of people or socialising with my friends.

According to Jannik Lindner, a co-founder of gitnux.org, studies have shown that 73% of teenagers believe social media has a negative impact on their face-to-face social lives.

Teens who spend 5 hours a day on social media are two times more likely to experience anxiety and depression.

63% of Generation Z say they prefer to interact with close friends via social media over in-person interactions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my phone, and I love the games and apps on it, but in my opinion, I just don’t think that people, especially in my generation, are getting more social and talkative nowadays.

I don’t think it’s even healthy for someone to be staring at a bright screen for most of their day anyways. It’s bad for the eyes!

Sometimes, I feel that I struggle to communicate with others because I feel that even my communication skills have decreased because I’m on my phone all the time. I think it’s almost concerning how 63% of Gen Z rather interact with their friends online, via text messages, instead of having a face to face conversation with a person next to them.

One day when I was in my 10th grade Health and Seminar class, we were all talking about our daily average screen time on our phones..

When I headed to my screen time settings and checked my Iphone, I was almost shocked.  I had about 5-6 hours of daily screen time. That’s a lot!

When it came to sharing out about our daily averages in class, other students said they had screen times around the same as mine. Some people had 7-8 hours, 3-4, and even numbers up to the 9 hour mark if my memory serves me right.

In the future, I plan to use my phone way less than I do today, and I hope that people around my age will do the same. I think it’s a good thing to enjoy the outdoors, and to enjoy what’s going on around you. Enjoying what’s going on outside of your phone can benefit you greatly, it can benefit your self-awareness

Self-awareness is a very important trait to have. Having self-awareness can greatly boost our decision making, and give us the ability to influence others or different outcomes of things.  If Generation Alpha, or any future generations learn anything from my article, it is to use your phone less!