HOW SMARTPHONES GIVE IMPACT ON SOCIETY

Fatin Faqihah Binti Faridulattros

Nor Izzati Binti Sahimin

Corresponding Author : atenqehah98@gmail.com, izzatimin99@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

Issues : The main objective of this study is to investigate how Smartphone give impacts on

society and also how Smartphone are transforming the culture, social life, technology landscape

and other aspects of modern society. Problem : The intention of this study is to know the

positive and negative impacts of Smartphone on education, health sectors, human psychology,

social life and education. Data : The study will be focusing on the data collected from various

range of citizens in the society. Conclusion : At the end of the study, we will summarize the

impacts of the Smartphone on the society and try to recommend the solutions on how to reduce

the negative impacts from the utilization of Smartphone.

Keywords : Smartphone, Social Impacts, Health, Education, Addiction

The more advanced the technology becomes, the more it seems to have control over our

lives. Today, the use of technology is widely available and insistently promoted throughout

the society especially smartphone. While technology makes life easier for people, it also

creates some problems on our society. One of the technology used in society is smartphone.

Smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced features and functionality. Today’s smartphone

enable consumers, advertisers and publishers how to better engage, socialize using this

platform by leveraging it. This study shows the positive and negative impacts of this modern

technology on society and will contribute to raise people’s awareness towards the appropriate

ways of using modern technology. By presenting the negative impacts of the smartphone on

society, it will have positive influences on individuals and society in general since

smartphone plays a major rule in people’s lives and future possibilities.

2.0 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Nowadays smartphones have several features that are comparable to an average

computer. They can also engage students in far more dynamic ways than a laptop or

tablet computers. In a research recently, the researchers declared that there are

more than four billions mobile phone users worldwide but only about 800 million

computer owners. According to another finding, nine out of ten college students wit

smartphones access the internet from the devices to connected with the social

networking and finding informations.

mobile applications and social networking such as Facebook, Instagram, Shoppe

and other apps to advertise their products. For online business rust is an important

factor in having successful online interactions.

Even though we can see many good aspects of using smartphone but there will be

some bad side of it to the society. For example the usage of smartphone everyday

can lead to addiction called as communication addiction disorder. In term of health,

smartphone leads to many diseases to its users such as ear hearing function,

Alzheimer’s disease, Brain tumor and so on.

In this report, we tried to discuss this impacts on society especially in business

sectors, education, health, psychology, and social interactions.

3.0 DATA COLLECTION

According to analysts, the long dominated Microsoft and Intel alliance is experiencing bad times

due to the rise of Smartphone‘s and tablets, and the pressure to gain market share in the mobile

device market is causing fractures in long partnership. It is true that still millions of PCs will

continue to be sold every year, but the Smartphone‘s and tablets will see more considerable

growth in the future. All companies are taking forceful steps to power their way into Smartphone

market, but still find themselves behind the curve, following figure-1, shows this growth

compared to PCs.
 Figure 1 : Growth of the Gadgets

According to a survey almost half of Smartphone users use their phone for access health related

services, figure-2 below shows the in health sector

Figure 2 : Use of Smartphone in Health Sector

Figure 3 : Mean and standard deviation for students' attitudes in terms of smartphone ownership.
4.0 DISCUSSION

Smartphone has impacted almost all walk of human life. These impacts of smartphones are

obviously including business, education, health and social life. The impacts are both at the

positive side and also at the negative side. At one end smartphone are enabling people to

create their own micro-cultures and engage into activities considered dangerous of society

and on the other hand smartphone enable people to remain connected all the time.

4.1 BUSINESS

In business smartphone has created new dimensions as many mobile applications had been

created. There has been a drastic growth in broadband and internet service providers business

in past few years and one of the main reasons for this drastic increase in their business is the

increasing use of smartphone and mobile applications. In a small duration of time a huge

number of smartphone have been sold that provided an opportunity to businesses to invest in

mobile application development. This is the main positive impact of the increase of the

growth of usage of smartphone in the society. It also allowed to introduce new dimensions in

market space as many developments appear in the field of information technology (IT).

The major negative impact of smartphone to the business is in the PCs market. According to

a research,almost 65% of people use smartphone to read news feeds, post status updates, read

and reply to messages, mails and so on. This shows that people nowadays are leaving PCs

and moving towards smartphones. As shown in figure 1 all companies are taking other steps

to power their way into smartphone market but still find themselves behind the curve.
4.2 EDUCATION

The value of education has been exceptional and noble since day one in human history and

the efforts to improve the quality of education has been appreciated throughout. Smartphones

introduced another means for the knowledge lovers to fulfil their dreams.

The use of internet has become a part of life of every student to search for the information

when it is needed. These days, smartphones has been use for internet purposes and it has

becomes routine. The growing demand of smartphones, availability of the internet and high

speed mobile browsing is ready to provide an alternative channel to deliver education

services. This will provide an opportunity to the users to utilize their smartphone to get

educational benefits anytime irrespective their location. This make smartphone a perfect fit

device for distance learning without impacting their work and family life. The Smartphone

provide access to modern society a massive amount of educational and learning resources. In

developing countries Smartphone can easily compensates the limited access of internet and

data access, which in turn help their infrastructure and education development.

Along with the great features, Smartphones enables student to text, cooperate on social

networking sites, play online games and even watch videos. This will be the sources of

distraction to the students. Smartphone also can encourage bullying and hazing which are

serious problems in school across many countries as it is equipped with camera and video

technology. The equipments are used to record and photograph bullying and hazing in

schools and colleges. The usage of smartphone also allowed students to access information

online to cheat in exams.

Nowadays smartphone are the most commonly used devices for communication. According

to the research more than 10 million users use smartphone to search for health information

and facilities. The positive impact is users can install any mobile applications to facilitate

them in managing the prescriptions, promote alternative treatment options and provide

validate prescriptions. Even today several apps are available to track exercise, diet and blood

pressure. Analysis shows that the number of people using health related apps is growing

drastically. No doubt that smartphone apps are very useful as these apps assist healthcare

workers to success specific information in areas such as radiology, paediatrics and continuing

education activities easily.

Even though smartphone is a convenience in daily life not only with a single click or simple

touch of finger we can access the health and related service anytime but along with the

convenience it also poses several dangers as well. For an example due to excessive exposure

of these devices in early age can cause poor eye sight especially for kids and the use of

smartphones exposes children to the habit of jumping from one option to another that trains

them to gather small portions of information instead of concentrating and getting complete

information. This habit is harmful for development of brain especially at a young age.

4.4 PSYCHOLOGICAL

As we can see now, the impact of smartphone on the psychology of human is quite

tremendous. For the positive impact, we can see that smartphone provides a mean to reduce

stress in busy work life. Smartphone enable us to interact with friends and families even

though at any different places. Users are able to know the latest news and development in the
political and social circles resulting in reducing the work stress. Social networking may build

strong social bonds as we can easily connect and keeping the social bonds active.

Although we can see a lot of positive impact but there is also the negative impact of

smartphone to human psychology such as addiction. Addiction to smartphone also known as

communication addiction disorder is a serious problem facing all smartphone users. This

addiction can be describe as wanting to be in constant communication with people even

though when it is not necessary. According to an article, researchers have recognized this

problem as a serious psychic problem. 58% of respondents of a survey check their

smartphones at least once in every hour and another 54% said that they check their phone

even while going to bed to sleep.

4.5 SOCIAL IMPACTS

The social lifestyle of human has been drastically changed after the introduction of

smartphones and this domain has encountered most of the impacts from use of smartphones.

Smartphone seems capan[ble to give the elderly people the opportunity to live more

independently. The more they can do by themselves, the better they will feel and enjoy their

life. As for the positive impact of smartphone to society, it helps a group of people to easily

remain integrated with society due to the services provided and many more features. Even in

today’s busy world, smartpone had made it possible for people to interact and remain

connected with friends and families all the time.

Addiction to smartphone is major negative impact of smartphone on social life. Survey

shows that smartphone addiction can interfere our night’s sleep. The addiction to smartphone

is kind of creating frictions in our life. Another aspect to be considered is the apps installed
 on the smartphone where the apps can easily manipulate the actual content and provide their

version of content. This shows that most of the time there will be issues on the authenticity of

the certain apps. Cyber bullying is another major issue the society is facing today. The social

networking site are likely to become target the next target for criminal attacks.

5.0 CONCLUSION

There is no doubt that smartphone has a sizeable impact on society and other aspects of life.

Clearly the enormous utilization of this devices by consumers demonstrates the volume of

impact. But there is no reasons to ban the usage of smartphone even as it is a great device

with a lot of features that can give benefits to the users even though it has a lot of negative

impacts to the consumers. The main impacts of smartphones are like able to always

connected, business edge, educational features, source of entertainment, privacy issues,

impact on cultures and distraction due to work stress.

Due to these impacts we have to control and minimize the time using the smartphones in

everyday life in order to reduce the negative impact coming from it to the society. Thus it is

very important to educate users to use the smartphone smartly. The education should

enhance the positive impact and highlight the negative impacts clearly in order for the users

to take advantage from this technology.

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