Our society as a whole is addicted to technology. Televisions, computers, iPhones—all of these gadgets play an integral role in everyday lives. But just because technology arguably makes life easier is not the reason everyone is addicted to it. The ability to communicate virtually, immediately, or even anonymously is what makes technology like nicotine. Children, young adults, even some seniors have developed a fascination with being able to know what others are doing at any given point during their lives. Amanda Hess, Odella Kaly, and Clive Thompson all outline how technology has affected their lives on a personal level.
Amanda Hess is a female journalist who writes about sex and technology has made it possible for her unsupportive audiences to contact her. For Amanda, she is not the one addicted to technology, but is the victim of others. Because technology has made it possible for anyone around the world to contact her, Amanda deals with threats on a daily basis. Her stalkers mainly choose the social media network “Twitter” as a platform for their threats to her. The people making these threats do not have to see her, look her in the eye, or even know her to make claims and statements at her. The Internet has become a place where it is possible for anyone to say anything to another person with essentially a wall of protection because it becomes hard to track them down. It is these people who have become addicted to technology as a means for aggressively communicating their discontent because this resource has allowed them to make claims without ever being face to face with their victims.
Odella Kaly starts out by explaining how she is a very independent person and does not plan to become dependent on technology. She too addresses how technology has effected interpersonal communication but does not plan to be the victim of that epidemic. She explains how “we submerge ourselves in the wall-less, abyss-like world of social media and online interaction that merely imitates real life” and that the communication is just imitating real life too. When someone joins a social media site like Facebook, they then start learning things about others they would have never known. Kaly then goes on to argue that this eliminates the need for real-life conversation because people already know everything they needed to know. Kaly, like Amanda Hess, places emphasis on this wall that makes not everything necessarily anonymous, but takes away the humanistic approach to things. She states “Our… [technologies] have become our intermediaries, placing us at a safe distance from everything we fear, anything that can hurt us or cause us pain.” Not every use of technology is negative, but this distance that is widening between people and normal face-to-face communication is disconcerting and a real problem.
Thompson does not blame the teenagers for becoming unsocial due to extensive use of technology, but rather he blames the parents. Technology has increases one’s ability to learn about events taking place all over the country, or even the world. Unfortunately, this has created alarmist parents when the world is not as dangerous as it is made out to be. Parents have then limited their child’s boundaries regarding where they can go, when they can go, and with whom. For some, it is much more comforting to just allow the child to sit at home and socialize from behind the safety of a computer screen. Again, we are losing valuable interpersonal communication that is necessary in human life. Thompson claims that teenagers “want the same face-to-face intimacy” that their parents grew up with. The solution does not necessarily lie within ridding oneself of every technology, but conquering the “irrational fears” that accompany a technologic world.
Despite all of the negatives that come from this excessive use of technology, it is important not to lose sight of all of the positives that come with it. I was an exchange student in France two years ago, and without Facebook, I do not think I would still be able to communicate with my host family or really anyone I met there. While it does heed some face-to-face communication skills, the Internet also allows us to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. There is definitely a problem with only communicating via technologies and that does need to be addressed; however, it needs to be addressed with the knowledge of all of the good technology allows us also.
I think you had a very interesting introduction about how people are addicted to being able to communicate instantly and almost effortlessly. However, the main body of the essay simply summarized the three articles that we talked about in class and did not provide much original insight. It would have been more interesting if there was a central thesis, perhaps about how people are addicted to the communication, and used maybe one of the articles read for class as evidence.