AP PHOTO/PAUL SAKUMA
BEHIND THE SCREEN
and then [my friend] changed it
right after and she got so many
more ‘likes’ than I did,” Casey
says. “And I didn’t get mad at her,
but I was like, ‘You got so many
‘likes!’’ She just gets so many
‘likes’ on everything. She has
more followers on Instagram. I
have more friends than her.”
For all the time Casey spends
online, she predicts that soon she
won’t be using her smartphone
or social networks as much as she
has been. It’s distracting, she says,
as her iPhone chimes for perhaps the 12th time that hour. Her
phone, be it Facebook, Instagram
or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework,
or her sleep, or her conversations
with her family.
“If I’m not watching TV, I’m on
my phone. If I’m not on my phone,
I’m on my computer. If I’m not doing any of those things, what am
I supposed to do?” Casey says. “I
think that in a few years, technology is going to go back and people
won’t use it anymore because it’s
getting to be a lot. I mean, I don’t
put down my phone. And it makes
me wish that I did. It’s addicting.”
But at least for now, her iPhone
remains the center of her existence. The friend who was the last
HUFFINGTON
07.14.13
“I’ll wake up in the morning and go
on Facebook just … because. It’s
not like I want to or I don’t. I just
go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t
know why. I need to.”
to buy an iPhone has recently purchased one, regaining her place
among the circle.
“Now we start hanging out
with her every week because she
knows the plans,” says Casey. “She
has a smartphone now, so that’s
what gets her in. We always loved
her and she was always our good
friend, but she was excluded — and
she knew it, too — because
she didn’t have an iPhone.”
Bianca Bosker is the executive technology editor of The Huffington Post.