Imagine yourself sitting in a restaurant chatting loudly with a group of your friends, when suddenly your buddies take out their phones and start scrolling them aimlessly while ignoring you completely. Or let’s take another scenario, it’s dinner time and dad is talking about something really important when you and your siblings grab your phones and start texting your friends or checking your social media status.

Dear reader, this is called ‘phubbing’, which is literally defined to be the act of ignoring a companion in favour of using a mobile phone.

Phubbing is a contraction of the two words; phone and snubbing. This term was coined in 2012 by Macquarie’s Dictionary as a part of their marketing campaign.

Sadly, most often in our daily routine, our eyes are glued on the phone screen, fingers tapping on the touchpad, while we are nodding our heads and uttering the words, “U hun,” “Hmmm,” “Oh really!”, while our friend or a parent is trying to have a conversation with us. Hasn’t this become our normal behaviour?

The question is not whether we are the culprit, or the sufferer, or are we being phubbed, or are phubbing, the argument is that this practice of snubbing others in favour of using the smart phone is ruining relationships and is inflating feelings of ignorance, loneliness and resentment.

This behaviour has become a part and parcel of our personality, that we fail to realise the fact that we are doing wrong. In our urge to connect with our friends on social media, or read others’ status, we actually disconnect with people we are sitting with. We only pay half-heartedly attention to what the person next to us is saying, while our mind is occupied in our phone’s content.

So what leads to phubbing? Well, one of the most obvious reasons is the addiction to social media. We have developed the habit of checking our internet messengers a zillion times during the day because of the fear of missing out. We do not want to be left out of what is happening in the cyber world, or in our own social media circle. We seek to connect with people online by missing on the experience of live interaction with people physically present with us.

The satisfaction we derive from a face-to-face conversation with our friends or family members can never be the same with them online. Many a times, non-verbal cues play a very important role in our communication. The way our mouth twitches or our forehead creases on hearing something unpleasant, our eyes lit up when we hear something exciting, the tone of our voice and the emphasis we put on certain words to show how concerned we are, our hand movement and body posture — all send a lot of hidden messages which, unfortunately, go unnoticed when we are being phubbed.

So what happens to a person who is being phubbed? How does he respond to such a behaviour? The first reaction is that obviously the victim gets offended, feels ignored, stranded and left out. He gets unhappy, develops feelings of being unimportant and less valuable in the eyes of the perceiver.

It could be possible that the doer might have used his phone out of certain urgency or could have done it unintentionally out of habit, without realising that his act is disturbing to the person he is sitting next to, yet the victim is now feeling all disregarded.

So, how to put a stop to all of this? One thing which needs to be realised by all of us is the importance of real life relationships, those who are present around us in real time. We ought to respect their presence and therefore, try to listen to them with full concentration and make use of the phone as little as possible. And if there exists a dire need to use the phone, then we should seek permission from the person sitting next, so as not to offend them.

The other possible way is to develop a rule of no phones during such meet-ups. This way the happy moments spent with friends and family can be fully treasured and enjoyed.

As someone has rightly said, “The most precious gift you can give someone is the gift of your time and attention!”

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 20th, 2023