Look UP
Picture this. You left your smartphone at home sitting on your nightstand. What is your immediate emotion? Panic? Stress? Relief? No matter the feeling, this shows how attached you are to your phone. Now, look up. Every single person around you is on their phone. No one is talking, no one is listening, no one is watching. It feels like you are the only person on the planet for a split second.
This is the world we live in today. People cannot leave the house without their phone, and it is their life raft to coping with stress, anxiety, depression, and simply just boredom. People argue that screens have lifted us into a new world and have advanced us lightyears ahead in science, education, and overall lifestyle. However, with these technological advancements, we must zoom in on the object that is completely changing our lives. What do smartphones do to us and why do we need to set them down every once in a while?
I chose smartphone usage as my topic of interest in this project because I am currently struggling with this very concept, and am making it my priority to spread what I know about the device that runs our lives. Two weeks ago, my roommate came into my room with an idea that would probably be impossible for some to wrap their heads around. She convinced me to delete all social media off of my phone. I have never been more grateful for a college roommate. Not having social media on my phone has decreased my daily screen time average by 2 hours and I have already noticed a change in my mood and overall health since lowering the number of times I turn on my phone. This made me extremely interested in the actual impacts our phones have on us every day, and I wanted to be able to really research what our technology does to us.
The science:
Smartphones are not healthy for your body and brain. Period.
The most impactful aspect that causes harm is the blue light emitted form your phone. This blue light causes eye strain and negatively impacts your sleep. The light also alters the body’s Circadian rhythms which is your deep sleep. This can lead to diabetes, cancer, and obesity. Additionally, studies have proven that Myopia, near sightedness, is much more commonly diagnosed now than in the 90’s. This is due to the blue light emission from phones.
Shockingly, many apps are designed the same way addictive drugs are. The rewards in certain apps, like candy crush, cause a small release of dopamine, which makes you want to feel that way again. This is called a compulsion loop and is used in many smartphone applications, as well as drugs like Nicotine and Cocaine.
Studies also show that just the way you look at your phone can create problems. Due to your spine angle when looking down at your phone, it creates the same bone and posture problems as if an 8 year old child were sitting on your neck.
Phone usage is also changing how we teach and treat our children. We see more and more often how phones and tablets are used as an immediate distraction for when a child is bored or emotional. This is symbolic of their later years. Research shows that teenagers actually use phones as a coping mechanism for lack of human contact. Unfortunately, scientists say that smartphones cause headaches, temper, sleep disorders, and depression; especially in teenagers.
One key aspect of this problem is the lack of stopping cues in apps today. Stopping cues are signals that tell us we are done with one thing and need to move on to another activity. Stopping cues exist in newspapers, books, and magazines; we know we are done because we have finished the content. However today, with how our phone is designed, we have none of those signals. On social media, you cannot run out of things to view, whether you are on snapchat, instagram, or tiktok. Even when watching TV shows on streaming services; though you have finished the episode or movie, we can continue to watch the next thing on our list. When consuming media today, there are no stopping cues and nothing to tell us it is time to get off of our screen.
There seems to be absolutely no positive effect phones have for your health, except maybe the apps that are designed to enhance your mind. However, those more positive apps are the ones that the daily person only uses 9 minutes a day on average. The rest of the apps are used three times that amount and can only do you harm, mentally and physically.
Above is the study I did myself. I asked 20 of my friends and family what their screen time daily average looked like, and here are the results!
Social:
We now know that screens are bad for our health. Some of us already knew most of this information, and still continue to type, click, and tweet away. Why? The answer for me, is FOMO, also known as the fear of missing out. However, what our society needs to realize is that because of smartphones, we already are missing out. We are missing out on real life. When we are bored at a bus stop or in line, and open up that rectangular screen, we are missing out on an event, big or small. This could be a good conversation with a stranger, the birds flying overhead in the beautiful blue sky, or simply looking over and noticing the baby waving at you from the stroller. All of these interactions are what keep us human and can even simply make your day better.
The more we look down at our screen, the more we are robbed of these opportunities to make our day different from the last. We must remember that the hours we spend on social media or Netflix rack up and at the end of each of our lives, we will have wasted years on liking posts and zoning out. For example, my screen time settings on my phone tell me that I spend 2 hours and 20 minutes a day (on average) looking at a screen. Calculations show that if I stay at that rate, that adds up to 35 full days I’ve wasted in 1 year. After some more math, I realized that if I continue at this rate, by age 60 I will have wasted 5.8 years of my life on my phone.
We don’t live long lives already, so throw in screen addiction, and we will begin to lose the meaning in our lives snapchat by snapchat. We must ask ourselves if it is worth it to have these smart phones when they will be used by dumb people.
Design Aspect:
I really enjoyed creating this design. One of the bigger difficulties was working with the woodblock limits, just because I wanted to make the perfect design while also needing to adhere to the guidelines. I started with a mind map to brainstorm different ideas. The most helpful thing I did was to watch a few Youtube videos on the subject that talked about different aspects of phone usage. One of my favorite videos was one that was based on a poem about the missed opportunities people have when they're on their phones. The poem is entitled "Look Up" which is a concept I enjoyed and wanted to roll with. I tried to play around with the concept of the difference of eyes when they look up vs. down. I originally had a more abstract version of the phone and the screen but it just didn't look right. The eyes looking up are supposed to represent life so that's why I went with plants and the sky.
As for colors, I wanted to keep things as simple as possible. I liked the idea of blue, because as we learned, blue is a very versatile color, and for the most part it puts people at ease. However it also can represent the blue light that comes off of the screen. I went from design to design until I decided that you really could not tell that line was a phone at all so I had to change it up. I like the idea of the cord and it representing how plugged in we are to our technology. It sort of looks like a face but I really just steered into the skid with that aspect and I like the abstract touch of it. I decided not to include any words because I think it just wasn't necessary. I like the simplicity without it and if you don't get it right away, I like that the audience has to think for a second to get the meaning. Overall I am very happy with my design and I like how it connects to the topic as a whole.
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