Phubbing is a modern phenomenon of people preferring their smartphones over real people with whom they are meeting in the real time and are supposed to be engaged into a conversation. If you yourself is not phubber, you certainly know such individuals who seem to be extremely busy with their phones although it does not look they have anything important to fix right now.
Check the impact of such a behaviour on both phubbers and people who have to deal with them.
What happens to a phubber?
Since phubbing is a direct result of an Internet-related addiction, phubbers are prone to the negative impacts coming with this condition. Still, everything depends on the particular thing a phubber is addicted. For example, if the Internet addiction is connected to a need to be constantly up-to-date with the information related to one’s job, this can make a person extremely anxious and incapable of relaxing as he or she has to constantly be in the state of vigilance waiting for some urgent and important information to come at any moment.
By the way, this form of addictions to the Internet is one of the major downsides of the Internet and technology. Unfortunately, instead of making the life of people easier with a simple way of quick communication, many people have access to their work materials after finishing a working day. So, instead of forgetting about their job for the rest of the day, they feel obliged to be present and check the notifications and messages without a stop.
For others such addictions can be of a different type such as for example constant checking of social networks, checking online stores or gaming.
Just like with many other addictions, the life of such a person becomes rather difficult since an addiction is gradually dominating all other fields of one’s life. If an addiction is accompanied by phubbing, people are not able to refrain from their urges to check their smartphones even when they are supposed to socialise in real time. Actually, with many other addictions before they become extremely severe, people are able pretend to be normal while participating in various social events. Unfortunately, for phubbers it is impossible. In fact, this makes many of them feel rather isolated and dissatisfied with their social life, even though they are not capable of changing the patterns.
What happens to people who are trying to communicate with phubbers?
People who want to socialise with phubbers are certainly not happy about their communication. The majority of people feel as if they are not important to a person with whom they are trying to talk. Of course, phubbing makes them feel uninteresting to a phubber. Some of them even get angry about it or offended by such a behaviour of another person. Many individuals also admitted feeling lack of respect to themselves and were hurt by phubbers.
There is a strong correlation between the age of people and their attitude to phubbing. As you can imagine, a younger generation is more used to such as form of communication and they tend to feel it is not a big deal. Older people are more prone to find it abnormal.
At the same time, when it comes to relationships between phubbers and their partners, the dissatisfaction coming from the side of the phubbers’ partners grows with the age of a relationship.
This is possibly the result of being more and more interconnected with another person with more and more years spent together which is probably making people feel worse when they see phubbing from the side of a person with whom they have such an intimate bond.