Cell Phones

Dana Pappalardo
Mass Communication
9/25/15

Throughout the years cell phones have developed into something completely different than what they used to be. Cell phones now have a huge social effect on people compared to what they used to be like. The technology for the first cell phone was developed in the 1940s but it wasn’t until the 1980s that they were available to the public. The very first cell phone that was available to the public was widely known as the ‘car phone’.   

                                                         

These “cell phones” were only available in cars which is how it got its name, car phone. The first phones that were made to be carried around also known as a flip phone, were only shown in TV shows, movies, and in the sales and business world. When these flip phones became popular to the public, they were solely for talking on the phone and nothing else. These phones were produced in the 90s and the early 00s. These flip phones became a huge success because it was a way for people to get in touch with each other no matter where they were.

A couple years later the first smartphone was produced. This type of cell phone was the biggest and newest incoming technology. You could no longer just talk on the phone but you could also check your email, use it as a fax machine, pager, and also an address book. The smartphone completely changed cell phones as a verbal communication tool to a multimedia tool. Cell phones are known more as a mobile device rather than a cell phone. The newest smartphones are essentially a handheld computer you can carry around in your pocket. You can do much more than just check your email and carry numbers but you can surf the internet, use as a credit card, text message, and so much more. While this is a great invention the social affect it has caused people is not great.

Back when cell phones were not around people were forced write letters, actually go to someone’s house to ask if they wanted to hang out instead of shooting a text, and people were not always occupied by something especially in a school aspect. Now when you go out to dinner with you and all your friends, usually people are always occupied by being on our smartphones because we are on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat etc. When there were no smartphones people would go out to dinner to hang out and talk with your friends, but now people go out to dinner and sit on their phones, eat a leave. A lot of the time when I go out with my friends we like to put all of our phones in a pile at the end of a table so that way we are all forced to talk to each other.  The problem with this is that this generation actually has to make rules that we should not be using our phones during dinner time or with our friends. 

In this generation there are not many kids 10 and up that do not have smartphones. Children at a younger age are starting to get IPhone’s which is making the social effect much worse. While working at a school, I noticed that most kids in the 2^nd grade all had IPhone’s or IPad’s. I would constantly get asked if they could take out their phones and play games on it instead of playing and talking with their peers. The problem with this is that younger kids from the age of 6 and up already have smartphones and do not want to talk to other people, but just play on their phones. This becomes a problem later on in life because children now are not developing the social skills they should have as a result from being on their phones all the time. When I was growing up I never had a phone until I was about 13 and even then the only reason I could use it was for phone calls to my parents. This forced me to talk at the dinner table with friends, and even not be on my phone all the time while with family. This is where everything has changed. Now children of young ages are not even talking to family members and get very upset when you take phones away from them, even throwing temper tantrums because they got their phones taken away. This is a huge problem because even when they are forced to talk to other people they won’t because they are too angry.  

In conclusion the effect of smartphones on children is huge. Children have lost a lot of social skills because they are not forced to talk to others but allowed to be on their phone playing games. Smartphones have turned into not just something you use for communication but a handheld portable computer. As someone who didn’t have a phone until 8^th grade, I was always able to talk to people but now children no longer have that skill because they are too invested in the new IPhone or IPad.