Smartphone: A Detrimental Gadget
Smartphone: A Detrimental Gadget
By Hom Prasad Timsina
Kathmandu, 23 Sept. 2024: What do you do when you are free? Undoubtedly, you take out your cell phone and start scrolling on it. But have you ever had a feeling that your physical, mental, and social health is deteriorating due to the excessive use of smartphones? A smartphone is a handy and integral tool, facilitating easy communication with family, friends, relatives, and colleagues. However, its adverse impact, especially on your health and society, is immense and menacing until you amend your daily routine and prioritise health to keep detrimental diseases at bay. It is a deteriorating issue that should be a concern for everyone.
The first and foremost potential health hazard smartphones can cause is health issues. Mobile phones emit radiofrequency energy, electromagnetic radiation, to send signals to the base station for communication, and when you use it, your mind is also emitting electromagnetic waves. As the radio frequency is high enough, it has a thermal effect and raises the temperature of your body, which may cause health problems such as headaches and, after long-term brain cancer or changes in brain activity, reaction times, and sleep patterns, as reported by the International Agency for Research (IRA), 2011. In addition, excessive use of cell phones has also been associated with stress, depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. According to the report of Butler Hospital, USA, teenagers who were constantly on their phones were less happy than those who took part in non-screen activities.
Similarly, according to The Vision Council, USA, spending four to six hours a day with digital media is prone to vision problems, mostly eye strain like eye redness or irritation, blurred vision, dry eyes, and additionally back pain, neck pain, and headaches. Last, but not least, constant staying also leads to obesity and other health hazards.
Secondly, the excessive use of mobile phones has created a social distance. Generally, it is said that cell phones have eased communication and helped keep in touch with family, friends, relatives, and colleagues. Although it is debatable, the fact is that a cell phone is prone to social distancing as it keeps individuals isolated and self-centred. A strange sight that can be visualised in every family is that each member is pondering on his or her gadget, entertaining different social media. Such practices and addictions have posed a problem in family relations, as there is no time to share happiness and sorrows, daily activities and plans, to read books of personal interests, and to teach cultural rituals, norms, and moral values. Parents have no time to keep their children on their lap and share the stories of history, arts, music, and literature. As a result, there is no love, care, passion, sympathy, dignity, honour, or inspiration, but a huge gap of emotional and sentimental relationships between family members and other members of society. So, let’s not forget that health and social life concern more than an electronic device.
Furthermore, social problems like cyberbullying, cheating, fighting, crimes, etc., are also caused by cell phones. Many people, particularly teenagers, are found involved in cyberbullying, like sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content, causing embarrassment or humiliation. Extortionists sometimes send threatening text messages and demand big money, sometimes try to cheat with a message of a lottery, and sometimes fight with issues of a text message to a girl or a married woman, and create human and social violence. Thus, smartphones have been very detrimental gadgets, causing health and social problems, and becoming a threat to human civilisation.
How you can overcome this problem is how you deal with it. The possible remedies are: You need to determine the amount of time you spend every day on your cell phone and value what is more important- health, family, society, mobile phones, or social media. Secondly, you need to be an example to limit the use of your cell phone and instruct your children and family members accordingly with stable alternatives to use time purposefully to engage them in activities like singing, dancing, drawing, playing, or other creative activities. In addition, establish a rule that the use of cell phones is restricted to at least one hour before bedtime, and also keep away during meals and family time. Also, it is wise to set family time and interaction for an hour, which is very fruitful to be connected through love, care, support, emotion, and sentiments, and understand each other closely.