Are you reading this article in a mobile phone? Are you ignoring someone in front of you to read this article ? Then you’re Phubbing and you need to stop it right now. Not that we don’t miss a reader, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of spoiling your social relation.
see also: Yanny or Laurel? One audio, but people hear different words. Why ?
Phubbing is a 21st century word just like ghosting or bromance and its there to describe a millennia phenomenon, ie your obsession with smartphone that makes you ignore the person in front of you in favour of your smart phone. It is not anything new, but it is slowly starting to gain some currency in our daily exchanges. In fact it was almost 6 years ago that a team of authors, cruciverbalists(professional cross-word maker), lexicologists, phonetician and debating champions teamed up to coin a word for this new habit that would make people put their phones down and talk more face to face. After all if something needs to be discussed as a serious problem, you need to name it first. So Phubbing soon emerged as the champion word.
Phubbing is defined as the act of snubbing someone in a social setting by looking at your phone instead of paying attention. Recently a study published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that checking your phone constantly while socialising over a meal can diminish your own enjoyment of the occasion. Now this wont come as much of a surprise, but what is interesting here is that the phone users have reported to have experienced slightly more tension and boredom, a lessened sense of control and a slower perception of time.
“Our findings suggest that even the moderate levels of phone use we observed are sufficient to create feelings of distraction that undermine the emotional rewards of social interaction,” they wrote
So the bottom line is, stop phubbing. Your smart devices are a handy tool but they aren’t going anywhere and you control them the way you want, but playing with the psyche of others could be different.
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