Tiffanie Herron
MC Contributor
“I thought I was going to die,” said Christopher Smiley.
Smiley, a senior business administration major from Crystal Springs, Miss. saw his life flash before his eyes as the blinding headlights of an 18-wheeler truck drew closer towards him in the oncoming traffic lane. The semi blew its horn loudly and he immediately swerved his car over across the median and pulled over to the other side of the road. He took a deep breath and gathered himself. His heart was still pounding away madly from fright.
“I was scared as hell,” he said. “When I looked up, I was dead in the opposite lane of the truck. I wasn’t in my lane any more. I tried to swerve over but it was raining and I couldn’t see. I was too close coming up to him and I was going too fast. In my heart, I felt like I was going to die,”
What was the cause of Smiley’s near death accident? Was it probably the sleekness of the slippery rain drenched highway? Or perhaps it was the rugged tires of his 2001 Toyota Camry? Neither, it was his Android smartphone. While he was driving down Highway 42 on his way to visit a friend, Smiley was also texting away on his phone. His attention constantly shifted from the road to his phone screen and back to the road again.
“When I drive, I have one eye on my phone and one on the road,” said Smiley. “I merged over into the oncoming traffic lane by accident because I was looking at Facebook Messenger on my phone.”
Smiley isn’t the only person who has succumbed to the temptation of the constant use of social media. According to an online study by DigitalInformationWorld.com, an estimated 2.3 billion people in the world are active social media users and spend an average of 17 minutes per day on a social media site.
“Because of the use of social media, we can’t communicate civility. We as a society have forgotten simple civil discourse thanks to social media,” said Marshall Ramsey, editorial cartoonist for The Clarion Ledger who also teaches a social media class at the Jackson State University. “It has also made our attention span a whole lot shorter.”
Students at Jackson State have felt the sting of social media having a negative effect on their lives. Some professors have a strict no cellphone or no electronic gadget policy which states that the use of social media while in class will result in expulsion from class for that day. Many students have been kicked out of class because they failed to pay attention to the professor’s lectures and felt the need to pay more attention to who liked their pictures on Facebook or followed them on Instagram on their phones.
“I got caught using my phone in my criminology class once,” said Andrew Kelly Jr., a criminal justice major from Bolton, Miss. “I was scrolling down my Instagram page when my teacher caught me and kicked me out of class for the day. I missed an entire class worth of notes and did poorly on my next test all because of my phone.”
Neil Vidyarthi, in an interview for Social Times, an online publication covering social media said, “To fight social media addiction people should limit themselves to knowing that they can have only one to two hours per day to use social media.”
Smiley has learned his lesson after his near fatal wreck.
“I’m addicted to social media, so to stop my addiction I’ve decided to delete some social media apps off my phone like Facebook so I can get back in touch with reality,” said Smiley. “I’m also trying to keep my eyes off my phone when they are supposed to be on the road.”
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