Like any other student, I have a period of time where I doze off in the library and spiral into a world full of pointless thoughts, zoning out, and awkward eye contact. However, I figured I could spend my time doing something actually useful, so I decided to observe the people around me in the Educational Resource Center of the Willard Hall Education Building. 

I started by observing a study group of four girls who seemed to be completing an assignment together for a class. They entered the room in a frenzy and whipped out their notebooks right away, as if they had only a few minutes left in the world to complete this assignment. It was evident that there were only two people in the group who were actually doing the work. One of the girls sat there in complete silence, and the other tried to help but kept checking her phone every couple of seconds. Whether there was something important going on in her life and she needed to continue to check her phone to see if she was receiving important news, that I am not sure of. However, it was fascinating to me how the technology consumed her and prohibited her from contributing to the group’s assignment. The other two students did not seem to mind and continued to work on the assignment by themselves, their backs turned away from the others.

I cannot help but wonder if this girl would have contributed had technology not been accessible to her. Did her own cell phone, a 3.07 by 6.24 inch device, really hold her back from sharing insights with her peers and being an active participant? I also cannot help but wonder about the final grade this group received on the assignment. Who knows, if she didn’t have her cell phone there, this girl could have been the reason why the group scored a whole letter grade higher. It is unsettling to me that a cell phone has the capacity to steer human beings away from reaching their full potential and restrain them from diving into the world’s many domains.