Speech Festival

Smartphones the thing you can use to keep in touch with friends and family. It’s where you look at the latest trends and memes. Smartphones, however, are taking over the lives of every person with access to it. What if one day, you wake up and no internet was working? How would people react to a world without social media? Since people are always on their phone, or they’re always doing things in social media and on their phone for popularity, and how people’s world revolves around it, the world would be better without social media and phones. Maybe without a phone, they could actually experience the world without wanting to post something about it.

Studies done in 2018 by Digital Information World show that the average amount of time spent is 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media every day. For 16-24-year-olds, the average is about 3 hours spent on social media. Every day, people waste hours of valuable time they won’t get back. According to Internet Live Statistics, 500 million tweets are tweeted every day, which calculates to roughly 6,000 tweets per second. Every second, about 901 photos are uploaded to Instagram, 1,500 Tumblr posts, 3,682 Skype calls, 73,021 Google searches, 77,823 YouTube videos are viewed, and 2,778,675 emails are sent. Imagine 2 hours of that daily.

The things that people do on social media are unimportant. As stated by New York Post the average American checks their phone every 12 minutes, 80 times a day. People follow trends such as fashion or challenges or what the biggest hype at the time is. People want to be the best of the best. They push themselves to the point where people would see them as popular. People tend to imitate other people, and that’s how trends and fashion are created.

People’s lives revolve around social media and their phones. People use their calendar, calculators, contacts, email, ect., on their phone. About 51 percent of Americans and 40 percent of Europeans don’t remember phone numbers. If someone were to take a person’s phone, the person would be lost without it and would have no one to call. A BBC research, said, “Researchers at the University of Missouri have found that people who are separated from their smartphones can suffer from strong psychological and physiological effects.” That shows that people are connected to their phone on an unhealthy level.

Cell phones and social media, however, is a good way to keep in touch with friends and family. If relative or distant friends live far, you could easily contact them through many sources such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Email, Skype, Messaging, Phone Calls etc. The weakness, however, is that people have a tendency to take advantage of that fact. People like to tell themselves that they have social media to keep in touch, but when they get the chance to, people don’t actually interact with their friends and family.

The world would be better off without phones and social media. People are always on their phone. They are either checking social media, doing something on social media for attention, or mindlessly on their phone because they’re bored. If people cared less about what to post on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and so on, perhaps people would be more aware of what’s going on.

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