Technology Can Be Bad

There are so many things that technology has given us that are wonderful, but we all know that too much of a good thing can be bad. We have managed to use and abuse these wonderful advancements to the point where sometimes I wish that they hadn’t been invented.

I am currently taking a math class, and when performing a difficult problem there are many sub mathematic problems within it. All of which I could do all in my head, but with the advancement of the calculator, I find myself typing in a simple multiplication problem to get the answer instead of using a little brain power to come up with it. And I know that I’m not the only one that does this. I see it all the time with highly advanced people. I know that they can do it, but the calculator allows us to come up with the answer without requiring us to think. Many people would say that calculators help. I would completely agree with them. They, do as long as we are not creating a dependency with the machine.

Cellular phones are things that have exploded in popularity in the last 20 years. They have evolved from what people refer to as “a brick” to flip, slide, and rotatable phones. They started off only being able to simply make a phone call to being able to now, listen to your music, play games, download apps, search the web, send e-mails, and text. They are not so much phones as they are handheld computers with the ability to talk with others. But are they as great as everyone says that they are? Have you ever been on a date where the other person is constantly texting their friends instead of talking to you? With these cellular phones comes great ways of communicating with others, but also with them we are destroying our ability to communicate face to face. Children and teenagers are shyer and lack the people skills that most acquire when growing up and are forced to communicate with others face to face as a part of everyday life.

Cell Phones are great little devices. They allow us to communicate with others when we are not at home, and can be in great benefit when we are in an emergency, but I think that we’ve become far too dependent on them. Do you remember before you had a cell phone? Did you feel deprived? Like you were a lower subspecies without it? I know I didn’t. Before I had one, I didn’t really need it. I wouldn’t worry if I went somewhere without it. If someone needed to get a hold of me, they simply waited for me to get home. Now that I have one, if I forget it one day, I feel like I’ve lost a limb. I worry if my car breaks down to or from work, and if I need to call someone I’m not going to be able to. The situations from then and now have not changed, but I rely on my phone so much. Sometimes I go all day and don’t even use it, but I still have to have it with me at all times

One thing that a telephone conversation lacks when compared to a face to face conversation is body language. Much of a conversation is not vocalized. It is in the way that we hold our body, the expression on our faces and the signals that we make with our hands. The idea of texting only further takes away from communication. There is no expression in the style of speech. The best that can be done to express emotion in text is capitalizing words or putting a smiley face after a sentence. For this reason, it is very easy to misunderstand something that was put in a text.

It is easy to be brave when texting someone. It is like yelling at someone from the safety of your car. Since the person is not right there in front of you (Wilcox). You can fire back a offensive response when you are having a text conversation. Even if you are joking, there is really no way of the other people knowing. There is just such a communicational barrier when holding this kind of conversation.

Computers are things that we have also built up a dependency on. At my house if the hot water goes out, we bathe cold for a few days till it gets fixed. If the car breaks down, we bum a ride to work or to school until we can take it to the repair shop. But if the internet goes down, it seems like the entire world is put on hold. We are disconnected, no games, no e-mail, homework cannot be done. Google cannot resolve any of our disputes. Life itself is put on hold. There are so many good things that we get from our computer, that we have to have it, or we cannot function. I work at a call center for an internet company in their technical support department. A few weeks ago the site went down for about fifteen minutes. Almost immediately there was a page put up explaining that it was a known issue and that it would be back up in just a few minutes. Even though there was that notice that explained everything that was going on, our phones were slammed for a good hour about people complaining that they could not get on the site. It was a large inconvenience on us because we basically had to tell everyone the exact same thing that was said when they tried to access the site. It seems when there is a problem on the computer or especially the internet, people don’t know how to function, and the blame is always someone else’s. Now there are many great things that computers can do for us and in today’s society it’s hard to think of life without them, yet life existed for thousands of years just fine without the thought of computers even being an option in anyone’s life. There are times that computers are necessary, but also a great deal of times that we don’t need them and can do without. This makes it easier on ourselves when we find that they are not available.

E-mails have greatly taken over the now referred to “snail mail”. There are great benefits to e-mail, like it does not cost any money to send, and it gets there almost instantly. It is faster to type, therefore takes less time is spent in the creating of the letter, but this lacks the care and love that is put into a handwritten letter. For a good amount of time I was very cut off from my family and friends, had limited access to e-mail, and used it, but I also did a lot of letter writing. I must say even though physically writing a letter took more time, I enjoyed it much more because I felt like I could put more feeling into it. And also when I would receive a letter it meant a lot more than getting a measly e-mail from someone. They took the time to actually sit down and write me a letter. I loved it.

Have you ever gone over to a friend’s house, and all they want to do is play their latest game system that is a one player game, and you get the honor of sitting there bored watching? Or have you ever walked with someone down the street, and they spend all the time talking to someone else on the phone instead of you? I think to some extent we all have. It is extremely frustrating and rude. The face to face communication that once existed, and the respect that people once had for those in one’s company is slowly decaying

Technology is having a profound effect on the younger generation. I love listening to stories from when my dad and grandpa were kids and the adventures that they would go on and the trouble that they’d get into. They had to come up with their own fun. They would ride their bikes, run, play, and get dirty. Actually being the ones that play the games, instead of being the one who controls a fake character displayed in a 2D world. I now look at children growing up who spend all their time in front of a video game or the computer screen. What kind of memories are they creating? Will their grandchildren want to hear about how they passed level ten and slew the dragon to rescue a virtual princess? Probably not, there is no good story there. In my own opinion, life is only as good as the stories it produces. Technology has many profound effects on children. Some are good, but many are bad. With all the technology that young people are exposed to, it seems that they are being forced into a grownup world at an extremely young age. It seems that we are no longer raising children, but mini adults. Kids are gaining access to things through technology that they would not have learned until much later

An additional problem with the growth of technology, and the Internet especially, is that morals are going down. Do you ever see a conversation around a dinner table where the parents are teaching children about how it’s wrong to illegally download something off the Internet? Kids are taught that stealing is bad, and many kids would not even consider stealing a movie or a CD from a store, also wouldn’t think twice about downloading something for free off the internet. Just as Illegal, but for some reason, doesn’t seem as bad. Not only is there the dishonesty spreading in children and people in general, but there is always that danger that comes with the Internet. Many people are scared to purchase anything online in fear of their credit card number being stolen. And for good reason according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center , in 2008 there were 275,284 complaints about fraud filed in the U.S. alone totaling to 246.6 Million dollars! That averages out to about 931 dollars per complaint. That’s an incredible amount of money scammed from the honest hard working people by people who know how to use this technology to slime their way into making a quick buck.

There are also many other Dangers on the Internet. Pornography dominating the web is easier than ever to get a hold of, just a click away. Chat rooms are also something on the internet that can be fun, you can meet new people and chat with friends, but then again, you never really know who your talking to. It could say that you’re chatting with a nice 16 year old boy named Jake, when in all reality it may very well be a 45 year old psycho who lives alone in his basement.

There is a story about a flock of seagulls in England that for generations lived off the shrimping boats that at the end of every day would throw the scraps of fish, and mangled shrimp caught in their nets onto the beaches. The seagulls became so dependent on these shrimp boats that when the shrimp supply ran low and the fleet of boats moved to a different location for a more profitable catch, it killed off the entire flock of seagulls, because they were not taught how to fish themselves. Thus the consequences of not being self sufficient.

I believe that technology has given us many great things in our society today. We would not be where we are today without it, but I also believe that becoming dependent these things takes away our self sufficiency and literally makes it so that we cannot survive without these certain technological devices. None of the great advancements in History were made because of Technology. They were made because resourceful humans used their own minds and came up with a solution to a problem. We are drifting farther and farther away from that. We need to use our own brains instead of making machines do our thinking for us. They are just lifeless machines that have no feeling or emotion. The more we use them the closer we become to them. So put away your IPods, turn off your cell phones, and get off the couch and live!