By Kat Diltz 

Staff Writer 

It’s inevitable–we are surrounded by technology 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Access to entertainment, communication and information is at our fingertips. While having this luxury has quickly become the norm in our society, I’ve noticed that so many people spend more time looking at their phones than at actual human beings. I must admit that I am a fan of texting and communicating on social networks, but I genuinely miss the simplicity of having a conversation that doesn’t focus around “what’s trending on Twitter,” or “who has the most followers on Instagram.”

Most of all, I hate the fact that calling up a friend just to say hello appears strange–I called my friend a few weeks ago just to catch up, and he asked me if there was an emergency as to why I was calling. Talking, not typing, is what the phone was made for, and yet most young people don’t even make one call a day.

Today’s modern humans have forgotten how to converse properly, which is incredibly saddening. We are capable of so much more than staring at a screen all day. We have the ability to learn and use thousands of words to say how we feel and yet we degrade our vocabularies to abbreviations, slang and profanity. We coop ourselves up in our bedrooms, playing video games and checking Facebook, when we could be outside in the real world, meeting real people and having real conversations.

I encourage everyone, if just for one day, to attempt to keep your amount of screen time at a minimum. Look up while you walk to class. Call (don’t text!) a friend to meet for lunch. Go to the library and read a book. Say hello to someone new. You can check your news feed later–don’t miss out on what is happening right in front of you.