Get your head out of your phone and LOOK UP!

By Nailea Ayala |Staff Writer|

“We are a generation of idiots. Smart phones and dumb people,” said Gary Turk in his YouTube video Look Up.

Turk goes further to say that we have become slaves to technology.

It won’t be difficult to go out in public and find a person walking and looking down at their phones, or sitting at home watching a computer screen for hours of the day.

Places like concerts, dinner tables, and school libraries all seem to be popular places for people to be on these devices.

But are they so necessary that we forget what it is like to interact with others?

It seems that people now find it more important to record a concert to later show friends on social networks such as Instagram or Facebook.

Isn’t the reason for buying a concert ticket to enjoy the live music?

Recording the concert still forces you to view the concert through a screen and miss valuable interactions with others.

A lot of people are guilty of saying the famous phrase, “Let’s get together soon, we need to catch up.”

Dinners seem to have become opportunities for people to virtually share the plate they have ordered or a picture in the fancy restaurant, and the time spent with the person in front of you ceases to be the main focus.

Can we really count the hundreds of friends online as real friends, if we don’t ever interact with them in person?

These gadgets and social networks let us see what others lives are like and encourage us to also share our personal life.

We spend endless hours behind a screen and we isolate ourselves to the point where face-to-face interaction becomes something extraordinary.

“I think people have become rude now that everyone has smart phones. I don’t know when people started to think that looking down at a phone while someone else is talking is something normal. I find it extremely rude,” said student Esmeralda Sahagun.

“The time you don’t have to tell hundreds of what you’ve done because you want to share this moment with just this one,” adds Turk in his YouTube video.

Phones, tablets and laptops give us a sense of being connected because of all the “friends” we think we have through social networks, however, news feeds don’t always share someone’s entire life, especially what truly matters.

We should be able to share special moments with others without having to immediately show hundreds of strangers, eat without taking pictures of our food, and look at the people who speak to us.