Persuasive Essay: Letter to Editor

Dear Editor,

I would like to draw your attention toward a very serious problem faced by most of the schools, in addition to ours. Most of the students in classrooms are found to be using their mobile phones, or other smart gadegts during the lectures or other academic activities. Few years ago, the student' usage of digital media was limited to cellular phones for short messages chatting only, while the situation has become worse with the evolution of social media. Over the past few years, social networking has gained wide popularity in all aspects of life. People now rely on social networking websites and technologies for various activities such as communicating with friends and family, playing games, collaborating with work group and many more (O'Reilly, 2005). The social networking has drastically affected the society and community. Today, nearly all the smart gadgets, such as phones, laptops, PDA's are well equipped with the messengers and social networking media. About 80% of the students in my class and other schools have frequent access to these devices and so they continue using the social networking services while their stay at school.

During a usual day, the students spend most of their time chatting with the friends, uploading photos, updating status and commenting on the friend's walls. The issue becomes more serious as they use the same social networking services during the class lecture or lab experiment; the students fail to pay attention to their lecture and instructor as they mostly remain busy in liking and sharing the status updates and other stuff from their friends. As they share some photo or update the status, they remain checking their phones or gadgets every few minutes out of curiosity that what comments their friends have made; this is a real example of digital dependency ...