How Often Do People Use Smart Phones
to Check Their Social Networks
Chapter 1
These days, cell phones are as common a sight as the local supermarket or gas station. According to UN ’s resent study, more people on earth have access to cell phones than toilets.
Mobile phone has largely changed people’s lives, enabling people to communicate whenever they want. We can search for information, buy things, check mails, read books and listen to music with our smart phones. However, it’s not difficult to see that a large percentage of students use cell phones in class, making the class inefficient. The frequently checking of mobile phones has affect our working efficiency to a great extent.
When I was in high school, I only had a mobile phone with keys and a small screen. It’s an old type phone which can only make phone calls and send text messages, in addition to some boring games. It only had to be charged once a week and I don’t have to worry that someone will steal it. My school was a boarding school so although I started using some social networks that time, I can only check them on weekends. That made me more concentrated on school works on weekdays.
Back in my childhood, there were no social networks at all. in the weekends I just went out with my friends playing basketball, table tennis or badminton. It seems as if we can often find something to do in our leisure time except surfing on the internet. I often miss that period of my life when I had a very healthy and nature lifestyle.
I had my first smart phone when I finished my high school. It’s amazing to see friends who are actually far away from me on Renren or QQ, follow their everyday life and chat with them whenever I want. I can read news on my smart phone in odd time and checking mails frequently. Now I can’t go out without my smart phone while I can take no money with me.
People have developed some cell-phone-habit which looks a little obsessive. Many cell owners sleep next to their phones so as not to miss calls, messages, or updates during the night. They also check their phones for messages even when not prompted by their phone to do so.
I can’t survive this ‘plague’ as well. When I get up in the morning I reach for my phone first and before I go to bed at night I check my Renren and mails for the last time. Whenever I arrive at classroom or sit down in the library after class, I take out my smart phone and scratch on the screen first.
It’s so good and attractive to have so many new messages and photos and articles that my friends post or share on the internet. There are often dozens of unread new things within an hour and if I miss one day leaving my Renren, there will be more than 100 new things that my friends post which will take me an hour or two to browse all of them.
People are getting more and more addicted to social network and online chatting. It’s so exciting when you have a little red point on the upper right corner of the icon. Who will reply my postings or who has sent me some messages? Most of the time we just can’t wait to see what happens.
Social network often provides brief information. When young students get tired of complicated homework or boring classes they often take out their smart phones and read the relatively relaxed information. Sometimes just because of our laziness and less of self-discipline we prefer to spend more of our time on internet.
In spite of all this time spent using, checking or otherwise interacting with their phones, most cell owners are more likely to get complaints that they are not responding quickly enough to calls or contacts, than to get complaints that they are spending too much time with their devices. younger cell owners are much more likely to say that they get complaints about spending too much time with their phone, and to get complaints that they don’t respond promptly enough to calls or texts.
One in ten cell owners express worry that they spend too much time on their phone. Young adults, smartphone owners and iPhone adopters lead the way on this concern. According to a research, smartphone owners are more likely than cell owners as a whole to say that their phone is something that they couldn’t imagine living without — 36% of smartphone owners say this about their phone, compared with 21% of non-smartphone owners — but even among smartphone owners some 28% say that their phone is something they could do without.
Chapter 2
Sometimes I find it interesting how often people check their mobile phones as it has became an everyday-habit like brushing teeth , going to toilet or drinking water and it happens more frequently than those others. Sometimes people look to their phones as frequently as possible or spend the whole afternoon chatting or keeping refreshing the network while sometimes people don’t bother unlocking their phones for the whole days and thay don’t care the amount of unread news getting larger and larger.
Take me as an example. When I study in the library I check my phone at least once an hour and as I sit longer in the library I become more tired and look more frequently to my phone. I also find that I connect to the internet more frequently when I am doing math problem than I do when reading books about economics or some other more interesting areas(for example, I didn’t check my Renren when writing this essay).
When I am traveling or shopping outside or just have some important things to handle I largely cut down my use of my smart phone because the outside things in the real existence deprive more of my concentration so often I just feel bothered to check my phone.
However, the frequency increases when I enjoy holiday and just stay at home with nothing to do. Maybe I will refresh the webpage once half a hour. Before I went to Xiamen from my hometown I determined to spend more time outside internet on studying and doing sports and I want to pull my self a little out of the world of the Internet. With a lot of efforts I have reduce the frequency of checking Renren but sometimes I can’t help open wechat to see if anybody tries to talk to me.
Environment counts a lot as well. When there are many students playing with their smart phone in the classroom maybe we want to join in them as well and we can’t play our phones when we are having some important meeting on which everyone is very serious and dedicated.
Differences are obvious that I turn to my phone more often when I am chatting with others or sending immediate messages to others which I am sure he will reply me as soon as possible. Frequency is also rises when I have just posted something on the social network and I eagerly want to know if someone have read my words or made comments on them.
Whether we try to restrict our use of phones or just indulge in the virtual world, there must be a critical value. What’s a critical value? Just like I had wrote above, if we haven’t checked our social network for quite a long time, maybe 6 hours, a day or a week, we may lose the passion to read all the unread news and when we start to read we just browse those recent news. If we keep the sense of self-discipline and just study or listen to teachers intently, we can’t know when we feel tired and more and more fix our eyes on our phones. So the critical value is the turning point or the maximum or the minimum.
There are many factors contributing to the frequency of our checking of phones as shown in the picture. In fact we can find some functions or equations to explain this, putting these factors together. After that, when we put in the numbers we can get the time you check your phone in the coming hours. We can also use the functions to adjust those factors to make us more efficient.
Chapter 3
In order to better understand the law of the frequency of people checking their social network, I conducted a survey among about 50 students last week.
First I asked them what kind of social networks they use. Not surprisingly, most of the famous domestic websites received more than half of the use. We can see that the number of people who use QQ is the largest. Absolutely in China nearly everyone who has the access to the Internet has a QQ number. In addition, many people have more than one social tool. Most people hold two or three tools. That means they have to square much more time to browse all the websites to follow their friends' everyday things.
About the time spent on social networks, most people spend 1~3 hours. That's not a big number, but if we spend the 1~3 hours on our work or some other interesting and piratical things maybe we can accomplish more meaningful things.
When I ask them when they check their cell-phones, many of them told me that they chose almost all of the options. Checking our social networks becomes our first choice when we want to pass the time and for some people, it even becomes an obsessive compulsive disorder.
As cell- phone and social networks have deprived more and more of our life, actually some people have recognized that they should do something to change the situation which is shown in the diagram. But whether those people really took measures to reduce the use of their phones is another story. When I want to reach my phone and check my Renren, I always limit my desires. But as time goes on, I can always find some reasons to refresh the websites. However, the result of this question shows that the research is worthwhile as more people want to reduce their use.
The check of the social network is a psychological process because the impetus to check them, the frequency and the time spent on it are largely decided by our own feelings. So it is important to adjust our feeling index to change the frequency and time.
As to the factors that make people not want to check the websites, the most important factors are how busy they are and whether they are doing interesting things.
I observed that the students around me are often looking at their phones in all conditions, so I wonder if they often choose to play with their phones rather than working. But the consequence turned out to be the opposite. Maybe many of them think it important to put work in the first place but actually they can’t help updating their social network.
Another interesting question is that whether they feel remorseful after spending long hours or even a little time browsing social websites Andy's what extent. Because as many students play with their cell-phones in the classroom and while they are studying. But the college students, especially in Xiamen University, are very excellent and relatively assiduous. When they were in high school, maybe they were forbidden to use mobile phones and they can spend all day dedicatedly reviewing for exams.
We can know from the figure that, nearly more than half of students don't feel so contrite after spending working hours on such entertainment. It seems like a paradox that although we want to reduce the use, but we still need to spend some hours on it, and we feel comfortable that way. So social network has become a necessity for the X-generation.
It is human's nature to be curious about others' comments on himself. Sometimes we may feel anxious to wait for others' reply. For example, if we send a message to someone else, we may keep looking at the phone and wish that person can reply as soon as possible, as we often add the phrase to the end of the letter. As shown in the picture, we find that more people can easily become anxious about the remind of the phone. Actually sometimes I can ignore the remind calmly when I am working. But if I am already in a relatively restless mood, I will unlock my cell-phone immediately it reminds me of new messages.
There is a sluggishness-phenomena in browsing social websites as when we finish reading all the new messages we still want more and we feel quite relaxed when read this
news. For me, I often refresh the web page twice at a time. We can tell from the picture that most people refresh once or twice. That's a good thing for our efficiency.
As I have written in the previous chapter, I believe that there must be a critical value at which we will lose some passion to update the social websites. The next question has little relationship with that. If we didn't appear on the social websites for a long time, we may choose to skim the unread news.
The next question resonates some person's experience. My classmate told me that she felt guilty after filling my questionnaire because she realized that she did play with her phone first after moving to a new place. I was very glad to hear that because I think maybe I can bring some innovation to the students around me by doing research on their everyday life.