Op-Ed: Should we host hangouts without phones?

Picture a dinner table surrounded by children and adults of all ages. Instead of eating and socializing, everyone is scrolling or texting on a smartphone, completely ignoring each other. This defines most of our current meetups, but I believe that we should hold meetings where phone use is completely banned, as this can decrease stress and increase the quality of face-to-face interaction.

Phones are understandably hard to let go of, as they hold our schedules, our memories, and our friends. Smartphones also bring convenience to the world since, instead of manually knocking on our friend’s door, we need only to text them. However, we must now focus on more than safety and convenience, as iPhones have eroded our foundational communication skills and forever altered our ability to communicate with the world around us.

The first iPhone was introduced in 2007. Since then, smartphones have become a vital part of daily life. Before smartphones, get-togethers mostly consisted of immersing oneself in the physical world with friends or family. Now, many meetups consist of lounging on a park bench, scrolling on our phones in silence.

First of all, phones cause massive stress. Because of this, at hangouts, whenever one pulls out their phone to send a quick text, everyone else follows. Although they are all physically together, everyone is emotionally immersed in their own phones. These digital distractions take away time that would once have been used to create actual, meaningful bonds between people.

Second, phones make us feel less connected to those around us. In a 2020 study of cellphone gatherings, it was found that people looked at their phones partially to avoid having to participate in conversation. This shows that phones can leave us detached from society, seeking solitude in the company of our smartphones. As phones act as an invisible barrier to face-to-face interaction, this erodes our ability to converse with people. When it comes to job interviews or anything involving social interaction, anyone who grew up with phones will have trouble.

Some may say that phones can allow us to add depth to our conversation by sharing photos or funny texts. However, this mistakes digital connection for actual, in-depth bonding. No amount of tech-based sharing can replace a full, uninterrupted conversation, and create relationships the way humans once did.

New generations are becoming increasingly reliant on phones, which is what we can already see from the majority of current hangouts. If these patterns continue, we risk losing the art of powerful, deep human connection. If we don’t fix this by hosting meetings without phones, our world could become dependent on the screens of smartphones, with humans being merely something to control this technology.