Phones and computers are destroying face-to-face communication

In the modern world, mobile phones and computers have become an essential part of our daily routine. Some people think that because of these devices, people are losing their ability to communicate face to face. I completely agree with this statement.

The first reason is that young people today spend most of their free time on their phones. If you go to any restaurant, you will see teenagers sitting at the same table but looking at their screens instead of talking to each other. When I was a child, we used to play football in the street with our neighbours, but now children prefer to play video games alone in their bedrooms. As a result, they do not learn how to make friends in the real world.

Secondly, communication on the internet is much easier than communication in real life. On social media, a person has time to think before writing a message, and he can also delete it if it is wrong. In a real conversation this is impossible, so people who are used to chatting online become shy and nervous when they have to speak to someone directly. For example, many of my classmates are very funny and confident in our group chat, but in the classroom they hardly say a word, and some of them avoid presentations completely because they are afraid of making a mistake in front of other people.

In conclusion, I strongly believe that mobile phones and computers are damaging our communication skills, especially among the young generation, and parents should control how much time their children spend on these devices.

The claim is a strong one. It is not that we talk in person less often, which is obviously true, but that we are losing the capacity to do it at all. On that reading I agree only partially: the evidence points to a redistribution of practice rather than an erosion of ability, though the redistribution has costs worth taking seriously.

The case against the strong version is that the skill keeps reappearing whenever the conditions require it. People who message all week still negotiate a pay rise in a room, still sit through a difficult conversation with a parent, still read a colleague's face in a meeting and adjust. If the ability were genuinely being lost, we would expect it to fail in those settings, and mostly it does not. What has changed is which interactions are conducted in person: the low-stakes ones have migrated to a screen, leaving the in-person channel carrying a higher proportion of difficult conversations than it used to. That feels like decline while being closer to specialisation.

There is, however, a real cost, and it lies in what the migrated interactions used to provide. Trivial exchanges — with a neighbour, a shopkeeper, someone waiting for the same bus — were the low-pressure repetitions through which people got comfortable with strangers and with silence. Remove them and the remaining conversations become disproportionately weighty, which is arguably why so many people now report dreading a phone call. The ability survives; the ease around it does not.

So the technology has not taken the capacity away. It has taken away the practice conditions that made the capacity feel effortless, and that is a smaller claim but a more defensible one.