Smart Phone Mobility Essay

The use of the smartphone, a mobile phone which can access to the Internet (Pearson Education, 2013) has become a trend. The Ericsson Mobility Report (Ericsson, 2016) indicates that there are 7.5 billion mobile subscriptions in the world, with 3.9 billion smartphone users. A survey by Pew Research Center conveyed that the amount of American mobile users rose from 35% in 2011 to 68% in 2015. (Anderson, 2015) Among them, 46% claimed that “they couldn’t live without” their smartphones (Anderson, 2015). Another research surveying 2,227 adults found that 72% people used positive words such as “good”, “great”, “excellent” or “convenient” to describe their smartphones (Smith, 2011). However, the negative impacts of smartphones should not be neglected.

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2016), “Metabolic syndrome is the name for a group of risk factors that raises your risk for heart disease and other health problems, such as diabetes and stroke”. Dr. Michelle Collie, who is the director of Performance Physical Therapy in Rhode Island, analyzed that the overuse of smartphones may lead to the vascular disease and gastrointestinal problems (Wilson, 2012). That is because the posture when individuals use smartphones leads to the reduction of the capacity of lungs by 30% and then it may result in “a lack of oxygenated blood flowing through the body” and abnormal “pressure placed on the organs” (Wilson, 2012). Additionally, sleep problems such as insomnia also troubles the smartphone subscriptions. Dr. Gregory Marcus, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (Scutti, 2016), together with other researchers, conducted a study about the relationship between the smartphone screen-time and sleep quality. After doing a cross-analysis aimed at 653 participants, they found that “Longer average screen-time was associated with shorter sleep duration and worse sleep-efficiency.” (Christensen, et al., 2016) These researches verify that using smartphones for a long time can cause metabolic syndrome and harm sleep quality. In short, the

For instance, Brandon T. McDaniel and Sarah M. Coyne from Brigham Young University coined the word “technoference” to describe the interference on personal relationships (Winch, 2015). They invited 143 participants to complete an online questionnaire, and the result showed that among all technologies, smartphones were considered as the most disruptive one (Winch, 2015). They also found that “higher levels of technoference were associated with greater relationship conflict and lower relationship satisfaction” (Winch, 2015). This point can be proven by another study conducted by researchers from the University of Essex. They put a mobile phone on the desk in the first experiment and a pocket notebook in the second experiment when two participants talked to each other, and then compared the behaviors and psychological feelings of the participants of the two experiments. The result denoted that smartphones can “have negative effects on closeness, connection, and conversation quality” (Przybylski & Weinstein). One explanation for that is that smartphones can distract individuals when they are in face-to-face communication and that sends implicit messages showing rejections to others. To sum up, smartphones can dissolve personal