Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 7m 1,856 #technology
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
The Technology Of Our Lives
A few questions to all those who use Social Media Networking, are you looking at pictures? Updating your status? Or looking at others’ activity most of the time? What do you do with your time while you are on Facebook? I’d say the answer you give would determine your personality and type of person you are.
- Twitter has basic news and status updates.
- Facebook has your friends and is becoming more an influential tool for news.
- YouTube has videos of everything.
- LinkedIn knows your professional life.
- Google knows what you are searching.
- Snapchat allows you to share photos and videos but only for a limited time.
- TikTok is entertainment.
- Other social media media has something about you.
They have your entire life. They know everything about you. They know your habits, your lifestyle, your friends, family, from what you care about to who you care about. There is nothing about you that is not on the Internet and all the information has been volunteered by you, from the very first time you log on to the Internet, and use it. There is information about you. Kids are getting on the computer and into a different perspective early before they should have ever known about the Internet world.
Children are now spending more time online rather than outside playing. Every child becomes a narcissist on Facebook or another social media network eventually. Research on life from the 1980s to the 2000s will show a huge gap in so many areas, specifically attention spans. More children than ever are developing Autism.
What is Social Media doing to us physically and mentally? Less exercise. Less focused. More into the addiction of the Internet. The Internet has become the drug that gives you the pleasure of logging into a world that is more dangerous than walking on certain streets at night. Why are we so drawn to technology? Where was our attention before television and everything else?
Seriously, we are a generation that has no idea what life is like without technology. Although, I am old enough to remember:
- Atari
- The fact that when I said, “AOL”, everyone gave me blank stares.
- The fact that I actually owned a computer when very few others did.
- What about missing a TV show? You missed it. Sorry. Hope they play re-runs or you can buy the VHS when it comes out.
- VHS (If you don’t know what this stands for … wow, I assure you, I’m not that old)
- Cassettes – Yes those things with the tape that were so awesome but would often get stuck in your stereo and would get eaten. Wow, I remember making a mix tape for a girl I had a crush on.
- CDs – Yup, these are becoming obsolete. Pretty soon, everything will be downloaded from the Internet and kept on your flash drive. They are still used for those who are stubborn to technology, but I assure you, these are gone.
- Flash Drives – remember when 128 MB was a lot? Can’t even fit a family vacation or a weekend to cancun photos or videos on that. 32 or 64 GB has become the norm.
- MB / GB … Yup, a dozen songs might run you a few MB, but getting to fill your 10 GB hard drive up was almost unheard of… now we need 1 TB and more.
- External Hard drives – They are useful but also becoming obsolete simply because of their size: like books, they take up space and you have to load them up every time you need to go somewhere. See Flash Drives!
We are like the Matrix: plugged into technology and it is draining us. We created it and cannot escape its grasp. Better to go to another country, where Internet is far less common, but there are not too many countries around without Internet. You have to go to the far reaches of the Earth to find a place without any technology. Are they having a better life than we are?
Where are we going? How much time in our life have we given to technology and Internet? What opportunities have we missed because we were on our computer? How many opportunities have we gotten because of the Internet? Our world is the Internet. Being on the Internet is the only way we can connect to the world, the only way we can know anything now. It even saves us a trip from having to step foot outside. Now you can have everything delivered right to your door, right at home! You can even get it shipped to you overnight.
When a girl just gave birth to her newborn baby, and yet remaining on her blackberry or iPhone is more important, or when a man pulls out his phone to record people dying inside of a car instead of helping them, than you know there is really something wrong with the world. The importance of technology has now taken over the importance of life. This is not a good thing for the future of society.
Words and ideas are spreading so fast around the globe. This is enhancing human technology and our way of life. This is the good that comes from technology. I can talk to my family in the United States while I live on the other side of the world. Before, I would have to give them a call at a specific time. And before that, send a postcard in hopes that the post office service would deliver it via a plane and an automobile to their front door.
Words and ideas are moving to be completely paperless. We know about our past because it is written on paper. We know much about the history of the human race because it was written down on some object or material. What will be left of the technology generation a thousand years from now?
Furturama does an amazing job to cover this: When they were first showing the moon landing in the second or third episode: “And this is how we believe their way of life was….” and it shows the Honeymooners show.
They have no clue about what happened a thousand years earlier, because nothing was being written down on “surviving” paper. It was all on computers that probably crashed and all data had been lost. A thousand years from now will leave us in a museum, and we will be to them, as the Ancients Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans are to us.
Technology is amazing. It changes life in so many good ways and yet leaves us wondering where the human race is headed. We are not getting as much exercise as we used to. We don’t go outside as much as we used to. We don’t do the things we used to. Why? That is the past and we have technology now. It keeps us alive, keeps us connected to everyone, makes life easier, makes life less lonely, yet ironically sometimes more lonely, and it takes us to a fantasy world of unlimited knowledge and imagination for whatever we wish to know and wherever we wish to be. Our entire life is technology from the time we wake up in the morning until we go to sleep at night. Technology owns us and we have become human slaves to our own satisfaction of technology.
So what is the next best thing? We have become so spoiled. We are continuously waiting for the next best thing. Well, it won’t be coming from the late god, Steve Jobs. iPod. iPhone. iPad. iMac. Etc. Now what? There’s more. Don’t worry. Technology is far from over and there is a lot of technology we don’t even know about yet. Go to Japan to see it. Japan is a whole different world. If you think our lives are immersed in technology, Japan dreams in technology.
Addicted to technology. Addicted to the Internet. Addicted to life becoming so easily captivated by a reality that has become our reality, where your body hardly gets any activity, and your mind is only left to roam and wonder. What will become of us? What will become of the world? Surely we are advancing as far as human intelligence goes, but does that mean people are getting smarter?
Technology is cheap. Everyone is exposed to it all the time. It is here to stay and it seem the only thing we can is accept the inevitable: It will take over our lives, control us, and tells us what to do, what to think, how to act, and makes us behave in routine patterns. The only thing we can do about it is come up for air once in a while.
Turn off everything and leave it off. Sit in a quiet house without turning on or using any technology. Going to the park. Try spending a day without any technology. No car. Nothing. Get away from technology. Record your thoughts the next day of everything you saw and felt. Notice how different life becomes.
We will always adapt to technology. It will do what it was meant to do: advance human life. Technology is our life. We need it. There is no escaping it because if you escape it, you fall behind and get disconnected from “the world.” Notice in your disconnect from technology for a day, how many people might notice or not notice. Technology is as addictive as coffee or drugs. It makes us busy and keeps us busy. Over time, we become emotionless robots too busy to find time for life. It makes you wonder, what about when our generation becomes old? Will we look back on life and wonder where the time went, and what we got out of life? Or will we still be too busy updating our statuses to all those “friends” who are still alive and reading your feeds.
After all this happens, your entire history remains on the Internet, even on Facebook, with its timeline feature, in which you can go back year by year and tell about events that happened, or upload pictures for that specific year too. Fascinating and creepy at the same time. Your entire life on a Facebook page. And all those profiles will eventually be stored in some Facebook archive, maybe deadbook.com or memorybook.com, where you can find your family history and trace back event by event what went on, including seeing your grandmother partying in some awkward bar picture. Soon enough, you’ll begin seeing Facebook pages created from birth, that the parents created for the child, and the kid eventually takes over, adding their entire life to the Facebook timeline, and maybe even inspiring tons of research and books called “Growing Up On Facebook.”
I wish I could be alive a thousand years from now to see how far technology has gone and the complete control it has over our lives. If we are just the early birds being spoiled with technology, think about all those who live in it and never knew what life was like without it.
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