Is technology really as bad as it’s made out to be?
By Sonia Panesar, Contributor
Without a doubt, technology has taken its toll on society. Some people generally veer towards the negative effects it has had on us, while others strongly believe that without technology, the world wouldn’t be able to move forward.
Technology isn’t just smartphones, video games, and laptops; it’s almost everything around us. Think about your day and how much you interact with technology, from the moment you wake up to the moment you put your phone away right before falling asleep. Can you imagine a world without the Internet? Can you imagine not being able to attain answers instantly?
The Internet has brought the world closer. Researching, social networking, communicating with business partners, video chatting—these elements are all essential to human life these days. They help us get through the day, and most of all they help to save our precious time. If there were no such thing as video conferencing, business partners would have to travel significant distances to attend a meeting—that would cost a lot of money and time. Instead, these days we have been blessed with video conferencing. It’s cost-effective.
Moving onto time efficiency, computerized documents are much easier to use: when searching a document, you can look for certain words in a text; when you type something into Google, there are several options available. Look at the scope of information available at your fingertips!
Older generations believe that we have become lazy and too reliant on technology, but this isn’t true. Our brains have been molded to cope with multitasking, although some think that we have shorter attention spans. Keeping larger amounts of our brains stimulated requires more neural activity. Remembering many websites and accurately judging whether a certain webpage has reliable information are sources of brain stimulation. You would assume that our generation spends so much time on the Internet that we barely spend any time reading. However, this isn’t the case: we actually read more. This doesn’t include the boring literature that some of us are forced to read for classes. This generation needs to be entertained, and since we get bored easily, we have all of this technology to help us.
Technology has its cons, but even so, we prefer to live with it. Not only because it has made some tasks easier than others, but because it is part of our life. We can no longer function without it. Imagine having your phone taken away from you—how reliant are you on it? That’s just a little appetizer to prove how reliant we are on technology.
