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Source/Credit: AOL News | Opinion
By Faheem Younus | December 20, 2010
'Tis the season to experience family reunions, engagement announcements, friendship renewals and feud settlements. All of which requires one essential behavior: eye contact.
But this holiday season, don't count on that.
Today, eye contact is to our social kingdom what giant pandas are to the animal kingdom – endangered. Instead of real eye contact, we are becoming cozy with the illusion of "i"-contact.
Just take a look at the most popular holiday gifts and you will understand: iPads and iPhones. During my last trip to Towson Mall in suburban Maryland, I watched as almost everyone in the endless, convoluted line emerging from an Apple store was calmly looking at his or her phone screens, oblivious of the surroundings. After returning my laptop, I held the door for a gentleman coming behind me. His eyeballs remained glued to his iPhone as he zipped through. No eye contact. No smile. No thanks.
This is not about brand bashing. Smart phones, video games, laptops ... almost every gadget has its own market share of eyeballs. And most of these eyeballs belong to a specific demographic -- teenagers.
A Kaiser Family Foundation study of more than 2,000 students in grades three to 12 found that 76 percent of them owned an iPod or an MP3 player and that they spend, on average, 7½ hours a day with their eyeballs on one of these gadgets. An eye-opening statistic!
We are losing this battle of eye contact to "i"-contact faster than charities lost their money to Bernie Madoff.
Granted, eye contact was always challenging in elevators, airplanes or subways, but hey, we did look into the eye of a cashier while paying for groceries at a supermarket. We did look at our neighbor while collecting mail. And yes, we did look at the person holding the door for us to say thanks.
Not anymore. Like your friendly neighborhood travel agent, eye contact too has gone online. Our reunions, engagements, friendships and feuds now occur on the screens of a gadget. In 2010, if a father communicates with his son through eye contact, it's plausible that the son responds with a text.
Some argue that we're just connecting in a different way, defending the 534 text messages exchanged per month by the average American.
Never mind if you live in the same household but don't visit your sibling's room for a week.
Or the fact that behavioral problems, lower grades and growing obesity are all linked to heavy tech dependence. In the Kaiser study, heavy media users were more likely to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along well with their parents and were not happy at school.
And never mind that "i"-relationships are increasingly ruining the real-world kind. In fact, a British study found that one in five divorce petitions now cite Facebook as a cause.
So remember before you buy a high-tech gift for your loved one this holiday season that there's more to it than meets the eye.
What if a silent epidemic of visual disconnect looms for our teenagers? What if "i"-contact is contributing to millions of cases of anxiety, depression and social phobia? What if these gadgets are actually taking a toll on marriages? These are relevant questions for us to discuss over holiday dinners and reunions this year.
Whether we end up seeing eye to eye on these issues is a different story.
Faheem Younus, M.D., is a clinical associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He can be reached at Faheem.younus@gmail.com.
Read original post here: Opinion: Is 'i'-Contact Killing Eye Contact?
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