First published through The Paris News on March 24, 2017. The article can be found on their website at http://theparisnews.com/opinion/article_63cc33c0-10ab-11e7-bad1-4b436b746f16.html

When did the telephone become a source of entertainment instead of what it was once designed for — to get things done?

I’m 100 percent guilty of this, as well. I’ll be watching television or waiting in line somewhere, and I’ll open social media apps like Facebook, Reddit or Twitter. I’m not using social media or the device as a means to better anything, merely to entertain myself.

Who doesn’t enjoy a video of a cute dog running in its sleep, for example?

This gratification we get from our devices isn’t hard to get behind. I’ve spent hours scouring Reddit, sometimes looking at the news to see what’s going on elsewhere. Other times, I’ve gotten on there just to get a little laugh at something. But, it could be deemed pointless and a waste of time.

For example, I’ve heard a lot of people swear off Facebook because they claim to have spent too much time on it. However, we see them back at it again a week — maybe even a month, if they’re really dedicated. After they decide to come back to the dark side, they enjoy it wholeheartedly until they realize they’ve spent too much time on it, once again. It’s a never-ending cycle.

However, though social media can be bad, there are some good things about it.

I have an uncle and aunt who live in Georgia. It’s not easy to get in the car and go see them. With social media, I get to see their dogs do some funny things or watch them shame the dog because he tore something to shreds that he shouldn’t have.

Another benefit to social media is simply being-in-the-know. I’ve learned quite a bit of information I probably wouldn’t have known otherwise, thanks to social media.

I have friends who will tag me in statuses on Facebook just because they want to know. A school bus was hit by a car a few months back, and a friend tagged me in the post to let me know something happened. From the time he tagged me, to the time we  found out the details took only about 20

minutes.

American journalist and former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather once said, “from the streets of Cairo and the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, from the busy political calendar, to the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, social media was not only sharing the news, but driving it.”

So, though social media and our phones are sometimes used for entertainment, sometimes they can be used for what they were originally designed to be used for: a productive piece of equipment.