Screen Junkies
10 hours and 8 minutes. This is the maximum screen time recorded from one of ASFM’s high school students in one day.
Given the high and evident rise of screen time, a survey was conducted to 80 high schoolers (40 boys and 40 girls) as well as 20 teachers to gather information regarding the topic. The results were the following:
Moreover, every student and teacher reported the top three apps they use during the course of the week. For both men and women, Instagram and Whatsapp were first and second respectively. YouTube is in third place for men, while women reported Snapchat.
Mr. Constantini shared his view on the average screen time of ASFM students. “I really don’t understand cell phones. I look at everyone around me, because I don’t own one, and see how attached people are to them.” He commented that students are constantly looking at their phones during and outside of class, even if they just look at them for no reason. “It’s a major distraction, when I walk outside of classroom the first thing I see are students walking at the hall and they’re not even looking straight ahead, they’re looking down at their smartphones. So their whole life is actually based on their phone and they can do whatever they want, but don’t realize that they’re owned by them.” Mr. C questioned the common idea that smartphones are essential in daily life. “In what aspect has a phone helped us? Does it keep us on schedule? I was on schedule before, I’m still on schedule.” He concluded that cell phones are responsible for the deterioration of basic interaction. “It’s actually getting to a point where people don’t know how to have a conversation anymore because the only thing they know how to do is express themselves on a social media site or on Whatsapp. But that’s my bias.”
Yami Melo, a senior at ASFM, explained the reason behind her high screen time: “I mainly use it because I don’t have anything else to do, it's my form of entertainment because I can explore videos, photos, all types of things. I’ve tried to use my cell phone less, but the more I think of it, the more I use it. It's something that has become a habit and I can stop using it. From the moment I wake up to when I go to sleep my cellphone is always in my hand. I have even found that I pickup my phone over 700 times a day.”
An average person is approximately awake for 15 hours and 39 minutes, which means that on a daily basis the ASFM community is on their cell phone for 22 percent of the day. It’s also important to take into account that the numbers presented in this article don’t include screentime for other devices such as televisions and laptops. All in all, smartphones have undoubtedly given us unlimited access to information, media and communication in just the click of a button, but the long hours spent on our devices could be considered as time taken away from real human connections.