Do We Rely Too Much on Technology?
Do we rely too much on technology? Technology is a great thing, it is used anywhere and everywhere around the world. Whether it’s a radio or an iPad, we all have some sort of technological device lying around somewhere in the house. Technology can be portrayed as our twenty-first century slave (without the feeding). You can ask it to do something and it will do it for you, it is a way of improving our living conditions. This might draw you back on a present for your mum or your house bills, but which one would you rather have? As we create a new generation of gadget hungry children that live on technology, do we rely too much on it?
Let’s use mobile phones as an example, one in three adults have a phone and the same with nine in ten children. When was the last time you used one? Or are you using one right now? If you are like me then you can’t be off your phone for more than two minutes. If you are not calling someone then you are texting someone. If you are not texting someone, then you are browsing the web, most likely you would be on facebook or twitter. If you are not doing any of those things then you would be staring blindly at your phone with nothing to do, or just waiting for something to happen.
Can we not stop using our phones and do something more productive? We seem very reluctant to just turn our phones off. Being a user myself I have nothing against mobile phones, but technology has become more than a tool and more of a lifestyle. The main purpose of a phone is to make and receive calls, not search for the nearest restaurant within 500 metres. We all have to adapt to a new generation of technology, especially with innovative devices soon to be released such as new ranges of skinny TV’s, new iPods and iPhones etc.
It’s all something we have to get used to. As time passes by technology seems to get better, better and better. When I was a kid all I remember was playing with my yu-gi-oh cards at break time with my friends and occasionally feeding my lifeless tamagotchi. Now when all I see are young primary children with their iPhones and their PSP’s socialising with people in other countries, all when their friends are right next door. 74% of households have internet connection, it is no surprise that the demand or internet has multiplied in the recent years.
I must admit though, nothing beats a game of call of duty with your friends around the world. Technology has brought use medicines, cures for diseases that people could recently not live without. It has taken us to the moon, made it easy for us to go to other countries (planes, boats and trains), connected the whole world together in an invisible network and more importantly made us the fridge. Without advances like these how would we get clean water? How would you stay warm in winter? All this things have changed the way we live and we certainly cannot live without them.
Nevertheless there are also bad things that technology has brought us, such as viruses that ruin our computers, explicit content that should not be seen, gambling sites that we might get too carried away with and not to mention the amount of time wasted just browsing the web doing nothing. Think about Facebook; an average person will use Facebook for about two hours a day. How did we ever procrastinate without Facebook or just without the web itself? Imagine a world without technology, I doubt most of us would be able to live in a world without it.
Do you think you could? How would you get clean water? How would you stay warm? Let’s be honest. Do you actually know how to start a fire (without technology obviously)? It would be a completely different world to the one we live today, more like the one we used to live in. I just think that we are starting to use technology too much in our everyday lives. We are starting to lose our traditions; think of a book, more and more people are beginning to buy eBooks on their Kindle or tablet, is almost as if we don’t need hard copies of books anymore.
Another good example is music; most music nowadays is just made by someone making random sounds with synthesizers. What happened to using real instruments? And what happened to buying CD’s in a shop? Or is all our music going to be directly stored in our computers? Whilst I have nothing against eBooks or online music, I think it’s good to buy the occasional CD and book, walking and not driving, playing football with our friends instead of losing ourselves in video games. When people say we are losing ourselves in technology they are right, we are, but is it really worth it? Juan Borges.
