Technology is Eating Us Up!

Technology is Eating us
Technology in all of its forms -- social networks, smart phones, the Web, instant messaging, online gaming -- is a net loss for today's young people.
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.
Mobile phones are also things that have exploded in popularity in the last 10 years. They have evolved from what people refer to as “a brick” to flip, slide, and rotatable phones to touch. 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, text and still more available things to offer . 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? With these mobile 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.
Mobile 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.
One thing that a telephone conversation or texting 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 and even that can hide mixed emotions. For this reason, it is very easy to misunderstand something that was put in a text. 96% of your physical emotions are more visible than your actually words. The eyes are the ones that give it the meaning.
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 . 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, but when confronted in real life, you suddenly arnt brave anymore.
Technology is having a profound effect on the younger generation. I love listening to stories from when my dad was a kid and the adventures that he would go on and the trouble that they’d get into. He 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 3D 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 slay bowser to rescue the 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. Kids are taught that stealing is bad, but many kids would steal 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!
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 girl named Mary, when in all reality it may very well be a 45 year old psycho named Claud who lives alone in his basement.
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 on these things takes away our morals 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 be like them. So put away your IPods, turn off your cell phones, and get off the couch and exercise those legs and brains..get in touch with the ‘original play stations’ !!