I am obsessed with my phone.  In a given day, I probably spend a cumulative of 5-6 hours just browsing my social networking apps, texts, and photos.  After logging my media use for three days this summer, I realized that most of my phone time is spaced out, but not by large intervals.  I tend to check my phone every few minutes (and yes, by “few” I mean about every 2 minutes) and then put it down, waiting for more notifications.  My whole life has become notification based.  If a friend messages me, my phone rings.  If I have somewhere to be, my calendar app makes a sound.  When I have to wake up in the morning, guitar music streams through my phone’s speaker.  Although it’s embarrassing to admit, I quite honestly don’t know what I would do without my phone to keep track of my life.  It’s a way for me to balance the various aspects of my life that I care about: my friends, family, school, and random events or commitments.

Even though people make fun of the fact that I’m constantly picking up my phone to check for nonexistent notifications, I still think it’s really cool to have such a simple device with so many uses.  I find out most of the latest news just by scrolling through my Twitter feed, I can see what’s going on back home through Facebook photos, and I can talk to people who aren’t physically nearby as if they are right there.  At the end of the day, I understand the insanity of having half of my time split between real life and media, but every aspect of my phone is so interesting to me that I literally cannot put it down.