In 1949 Carol Channing sung the song Diamonds are a girl’s
best friend, during the hit Broadway show, Gentleman Prefer Blondes; and it was
made famous in the 50’s by It girl Marilyn Monroe performing it the film
remake. Over the years many many many people have sung or quoted the words from
this famous song! But in modern day society it kinda feels like this may have
changed a bit.
Rather than diamonds being a girl’s best friend, it’s
iPhones!
Over the last few months I’ve become more and more aware of
just how much time I spend on my phone each day. But didn’t have a way of
accurately figuring out, how much time it actually was rather than what I
assumed or wanted it to be. However after seeing a conversation on Twitter, I
found out about an app called Moment.
Moment is an app that does one job, it monitors your phone usage.
It runs in the background whilst you’re doing your stuff on your phone, and
times how long each day you’re on it. For over a month now, since March 8th,
I have been tracking my phone usage and it really does seem like my iPhone is
my best friend. I also tracked the
amount of time I spent on my phone whilst on holiday, but I haven’t included
those in my lil’ analysis as it didn’t seem very representative of my normal
life. Over the 22 days from March 8th to March 30th I
have cumulatively spent 100hrs and 74 minutes on my phone, out of the 528 hours
that those 22 days hold. That is an average of 4hrs, 57 minutes a day.
Looking at those statistics I’m not quite sure how to feel
really, I guess without having someone else’s statistics to compare them to it’s
a little tricky. But in reality 100hrs over 22 days seems and feels like a lot
to me, but then an average of 5 hours a day out of 24, doesn’t necessarily seem
that much. Yet going on to the app and actually seeing how many hours a day I’ve
spent scrolling and tapping and typing, it does feel like a lot of my day.
The question of do we spend too much time on our phones and
social media is one that has raged over the last few years, with many, many,
many people saying that the answer is yes. That we need to put our phones down,
go outside and actually talk to people. But thanks to phones maybe we actually
spend more time talking and connecting with people than previously. We no
longer only know the people who live on our street, or in our village or that
we go to school with. But can connect with, share and speak to people not only
in our own country but those in countries across the globe. We can easily stay
in constant touch with friends who we don’t live near anymore, rather than only
being able to send them letters and hoping they don’t get lost in the post.
I guess like most things, phones have both their positives
and negatives, and monitoring my phone usage these past weeks has really made
me think about and consider how much time I spend using it and how I spend my
time in general. Being given the time and reason to consider what it is I spend
my time doing on my phone and why I do it, has been both really interesting and
helpful. I don’t think I can promise that I’m going to drop my average phone
usage to an hour next month. That feels very drastic and very unrealistic, but
constantly monitoring how much time I spend on my phone versus doing other
things. Or keeping an eye on what it is I’m doing on my phone, so playing games
compared to keeping in touch with people, is something that I definitely want
to do.
I would highly recommend downloading Moment and monitoring
your phone usage. It’s a very, very interesting experiment, and really does
make you think about things and consider how you spend your time and what it is
you’re really using your lil’ phone friend for.
