Technology Dependence Essay Example

Technology Dependence Essay Example Technology Dependence Essay Technology Dependence Essay 26 April 2012 Technology Dependence I was fourteen years old when I received my first cell phone. It was Just your normal indestructible flip phone. It lasted me for about two and a half years even though it had a lot of wear and tear and didnt look the prettiest it still worked and I had no complaints. On my current phone I can access my email, watch movies, and download music all with Just a touch of a button and instantly its there on the screen. Its crazy how in Just five short years I went from having a phone that I could only make phone calls on to basically having my own portable computer and entertainment center on my phone. As you can see our society today knows their way around all the new technology, but yet the majority of them could not imagine what life would be like without it. In our society today parents are buying cell phones for their kids at younger and younger ages. More and more kids are becoming addicted to the latest gaming systems and couldnt imagine going an entire day without some type of technology fix. This is causing kids to not want to play outside and be active because they rather play on the latest phone, pad, Oxbow, or WI. Information technology has reached the mint where you can open up your computer or switch on your phone and talk to whomever you choose, know exactly where your friends are or what they are up to and find out what something means all with a mere click of a mouse (newness. Mom). Its crazy how much we take the technology we have today for granted. Kids these days dont understand how their parents and their grandparents and so on could have made it through a day without having a constant technology fix. Even worse they dont even realize that cell phones are actually apart of the recent technology in our society. The first cellular phone was invented in 1973, which really isnt that long ago. If you think about it ou r grandparents were in their thirties or so, and my own parents were only in their teens. Now looking at todays society compared to when it first came out almost every person you interact with has a cell phone and they always have it on them and some would even say they feel naked when they dont have their cell phone with them. More broadly, cell phones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits (anytime. Com). With all the new technology we have today you can figure out what anyone is doing within a matter of seconds without even calling them. With all the social networking sites now showing where people are when they post stuff you can Just look at someones backbone wall and figure out what city they are in or look at a tweet and figure out what street they were on when they posted it. Yet all the new technology isnt completely ruining our society as a whole, there are some good aspects that come out of it that actually benefit our society. Imaging studies show the brains of internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual activity (anytime. Mom). Yet it doesnt help our some good in our young society today. But the extent that our young society is attached to these isnt helping as much as it really is hurting them in the long run. With all the smartness on the market today that have Gaps built into them its almost a necessity for experienced drivers to have for road trips or Just finding their way around new places all in the palm of your hand for a much c heaper price than a TOMATO, and it does so much more than Just tell you directions as you already know. Its sad to see what our society today is becoming with all the new and addictive technology we are being exposed to. People are now starting to crave fixes of technology and wouldnt even begin to imagine a day without any sort of fix, yet Just a decade ago most of it was nonexistent and we take it all for granted. In an article by Matt Richter, Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, Richer describes a young businessman in his late twenties and his addiction to technology, Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans and he has trouble focusing on his family. Our society today is starting to miss out on all the interpersonal connections and communication skills that we had a decade ago. We are basically starting to take all our new advances in technology for granted and arent realizing how much it is hurting us. If you sit back and think about it you dont really hear much about people actually sitting down together and having so called family time or at least a family dinner with no television on in the background or cell phones out. We are that addicted that we couldnt imagine turning our cells phones on silent mode and leaving them in a efferent room and have what used to be a normal family dinner with Just everybody sitting down, conversing and having a technology free dinner for once. As teenagers they cant imagine doing any of this. When parents get mad and tell them to put their phone away all they do is ignore them and either hide that they are doing it or Just roll their eyes and keep on typing away. Our young society knows their way around all the latest technology, which in some cases can be very beneficial but for the most part its Just killing all the communication and personal skills they grew up learning before being introduced to such thing as technology. Now if you look at all the new toys coming out for you kids to infants there is some type of electronic device incorporated into it somewhere. Just think back a few years and the big craze was how television was the major media that was affecting the young societys academics and attention span. But according to Daniel Anderson, professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Multitasking using ubiquitous, interactive and highly stimulating computers and phones, appears to have a more powerful effect than TV. (anytime. Com) Its crazy to think that when parents were all concerned about the mount of television their kids were watching was affecting the brain to not even thinking about all the effects the new technology we have today is affecting the overall young societys brains on a daily basis. Im doing Backbone, Youth, having a conversion or two with a friend, listening to music at the same time. Im doing a million things at once, like a lot of people my age. Sometimes Ill say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, but I cant. After reading a quote from a kid who is in our young society today. What is it going to take to get people to realize it? Also will e be able to realize it before its too late to change anything? In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960 (anytime. Com). Just think 2008 was Just four short years ago and look how much our technology has advanced in those four short years. If you compare today to 1960 Im sure its a whole lot more than Just three times. We are losing intimacy with the natural world outside of all the new technology that we are being introduced to daily and becoming more addicted than ever. Im so addicted to this device that I stopped mid-bite to rush to send this message (WebMD. Com). Many young adults and even adults are actually guilty of doing this at least once and most do it daily. Mostly teens are guilty of this but they are not the only ones. Many young business men and women are guilty of having their blackberry glued to their hand and check it every ten seconds for what they think is the most important email of their life when they should be enjoying a nice lunch catching up with a close friend from college that is in visiting for the weekend. But instead we completely ignore the fact that they are sitting across the table from you and you end up ruining what should be a great time. According to Alan Eaton, Latin teacher at Woodside High School in California, Its a catastrophe, technology has led to a balkanization of their focus and duration of stamina, and the schools make the problem worse when they adopt the technology (anytime. Com). Now not all technology in schools is horrible like Eaton says it is but to the extent of what school systems are starting to incorporate is becoming more distracting for them to find ways to get on Backbone and Youth even if the websites a supposedly blocked. With the kids in our society today that grew up with all the latest technology they now their way around little road blocks like blocking certain web pages while they are at school. So instead of doing interactive math problems on the latest Macho they are instead playing with the WebMD and posting all the pictures online. Teachers, Administrators, and other school officials really think that bringing in the latest technology is helping students stay focused and learn more efficiently because of how this young society has been brought up. The advances in technology have gotten so bad that, Private information is now very easily obtained one can simply Google someone and instantly have his or her tactics appear on the screen (newness. Com). Just think millions of so called bored teenagers surfing the web and goggling random subjects and people on a daily basis have access to find out person qualities and some sites will even list what city and state you live in. Now most sites you have to pay to get more detailed information about yourself but its scary to know that if someone is willing to pay they could find out your exact address and possibly stalk you or even try and steal your identity with what information is out on the web for them to access about you. Technology advances nowadays is actually becoming a little bit scary because you just dont know what sites to trust in case somehow you get a virus from an ad that popped up or you accidental had a typo in the website you were going to and you ended up getting infected with a virus. Which in todays technology viruses are no longer restricted to computers but you can get them on your Macho, pad, phone, technology dependent society that we are, and are currently still building, would kill everyone because they wouldnt know what to do if they didnt have access to everything they supposedly need twenty-four/ seven, in the palm of our hand. Some of the bigger harms of the easy access to technology is giving kids more and more ways to bully others. Bullying used to be strictly in person, both verbal and physical. But nowadays kids are becoming more and more confident behind a computer screen in the comfort of their own home to say whatever they want to say and be tougher than they really are. Rather than in the past majority of kids wouldnt even think about bullying others because of consequences but with all the technology advances kids are Just becoming way to confident with a technology airier between them and the victim. Slanderous information sent out into cyberspace is difficult, if not impossible, to expunge. Cyber-bullying often takes the form of cyber gossip, where damaging content is based on whim; not facts, and is posted on social networking sites (Cameron. Org). Whats even worse is that nothing is being done to stop this and as our technology advances more every day, this is Just going to get worse. Schools systems act like they are trying to take care of the problem if it happens in one of their schools but in all reality they say they cant ally do anything because it is all on the internet and not happening directly on school grounds that they know of. So what is our technology dependent world coming too? Are we really Just going to lets things like cyber bullying, and hackers and viruses take over everything in our lives and end up ruining everything that we have worked hard for, for years before all of this evil technology was even invented. If we dont do something about changing some of our dependence on the technology we will end up having everything in our lives controlled by technology.