Being separated from iPhones make people stupid and anxious

Computer mediated communication is any human communication achieved through, or with the help of, computer technology. Computer provides applications and databases as a medium or channel for humans to communicate. As we have gone through in class, CMC has many advantages and disadvantages. CMC allows humans to communicate without worrying about the time and distance. Also through CMC humans are available 24/7. Since humans don’t need to physically meet each other, time and distance are obsolete. Before CMC was developed and used widely, humans had limitation when working with one another. Humans could not have collaborated if they were physically apart. However, nowadays people in same interest collaborate to achieve a goal through CMC. On the other hand, CMC have many downsides as well. One of the major disadvantages of CMC is the amount of information that hasn’t been censored. We do not know which information is accurate and has enough credibility. Also, sometimes it lacks concentration. A person could be talking about a subject 1 while others talk about subject 2. If open forum for discussion is the advantage of CMC, the endless discussion could be the downside of CMC.

I guess advantages of CMC outweigh the disadvantages. So many people rely on CMC nowadays that it seems almost unnatural to not utilize CMC.

I want to stress one major disadvantage of CMC that have been recently studied. “Being separated from iPhones make people stupid and anxious,” an article from The Independent have revealed the big disadvantage of utilizing CMC. People who were incapable of answering their smart phones while solving cognitive tasks had a worse outcome than others, an experiment has found. While the participants’ smart phones were ringing and they were unable to answer it, their heart rate and blood pressure increased, as well as feelings of anxiety and unpleasantness.

Two groups tasks were to do word-search puzzles, with one group doing so while they could hear their phone ringing, write Russell B Clayton, Glenn Leshner and Anthony Almond in the paper., ‘The extended iSelf,’ published in the journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The group that was sundered from their iPhones did worse in task. At the first class of our lab section, more than 70% of students have announced they could not live without their smart phones. Many of them said it had everything they needed and that smart phones enable them to get instant access to whatever they were searching for. I knew that nowadays people don’t like to be away from their smart phones but I did not realize the negative effects of not being able to respond to their phones. Of course, there are still plenty of people who do not need smart phones to carry on with their lives however, it seems like the number is likely decrease soon or later. Many people will suffer from nomophobia. The term, nomophobia, an abbreviation for “no-mobile phone phobia” is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. Like it was stated in the article, I guess people feel anxious without their smart phones because they have a fear of missing out. Smart phones help people feel a sense of ‘extended self’ – the idea that people’s possessions can become an extension of themselves (Andrew Griffin, 2014). The researchers from the study have addressed that the outcomes provide insight into attention and how distractions can lead us astray. Not being able to answer the phone might make us worse at our job, interacting with people and engaging with media.