Technology is great, ain’t it? Right, all that self-absorbed mobile communication and music connoisseur-ing couldn’t possibly have any real-world social implications.
Oh wait, it turns out that the 84% penetration in the mobile phone market is helping to make people more averse to social interactions. Some people would call his being “shy.” Harvard researcher Robin Abrahams says that mobile phones and portable music players are something of a safe harbor for people to hide from having to deal with today’s increasingly complex social interactions. It used to be that 40% of people “reported being shy in social situations,” that statistic has increased to afflict about half of all people in the US.
So, maybe all that SMS text messaging and iPod-listening is doing more bad than good. Stop all that mobile chatting and call your friend. Pause that latest “Pink” album and chat up that lonely business-woman on the train – you two might hit it off.
Moral? Get yourself a healthy dose of social interaction, we hear it’s good for warding off that problem we all call “shyness.”
[Via: The Daily Telegraph]