The World Is Technology

Bryshanna Curtis
English 1301
Adam Castaneda
October 12, 2012
The World Is Technology
Today’s society is addicted to a world of online blogging and Web browsing. We are dependent on the Internet to think for us, whether it’s for an assignment or for social sites. Everything is so quick and easy for us, it changes the way we think. Dennis Baron and Nicholas Carr both show how Internet technology allows us to access different portals of information.
Libraries are no longer the place for reading or checking out books, it’s the place mostly used to browse the Web and to use social media. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and thesauruses are becoming extinct because anytime we don’t know the meaning of a word or have problems spelling a word, we pick up our phones or laptops to search the Web. On the Internet, we can read summaries and look up words, instead of picking up a book or dictionary. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a long article on the web or in print” (338). The author is saying that since we read small pieces of writing all the time we have lost the ability to read longer ones. When I was in High school I would always read a summary of the story to keep from reading the whole book. In today’s culture, we just get on the computer and start typing an essay instead of writing a rough draft. “It was inevitable that handwriting would become a lost art, revived from time to time by people who feel trapped in the present” (329). Cursive writing is no longer used in today’s society. The only time I would write in cursive, was if I was writing my signature. Students struggle tremendously on writing test, because they lack writing skills. Elementary schools no longer focus on handwriting in 3rd through 5th grade because testing requirements consume the majority of their work day schedule skills. They don’t want to take the time to write a rough draft, they rely on the computer to fix their mistakes. I’ve lost my ability to read long novels, because I go to Google to gather bits of information. “The more we use the web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” (338). Each time I’m reading a book, after two pages I lose interest. Google allows you to find a book summarized, so you don’t have to read a book page by page. You can just Google it and read one paragraph. People do so many things online every day. “It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculators and our telephone, and our radio and TV” (340). We are too comfortable with the Internet because it has taken the place of so many different things. We don’t use paper maps anymore because we go to the Internet and just type in the place we want to go and the Internet pulls up the address to our destination. The need for white pages, yellow pages, and newspapers has decreased. The Internet makes it more easy and convenient to find businesses and residents. This practice cuts down on paper waste and ultimately saves trees.
Who would be a part of our lives if it weren’t for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Those social networks make it easier for us to keep in touch with friends and family without the expense of traveling. It saves time and money because we no longer have to go to the post office to buy stamps in order to mail letters. “The cell phone is changing spoken interaction in ways that continue to evolve” (327). Cell phones are changing the way we communicate. We no longer see each other, because all we have to do is just dial the other person’s number. Before cell phones the only way to communicate with someone is face to face or on your email. Cell phones are more convenient in today’s culture, because without them we wouldn’t keep in touch with our family and friends. I use my cell phone to keep in contact with my family, just in case of emergencies. In certain situations it would be good to talk to someone face to face because , if Im talking to someone about something personal, I don’t want to be on speaker phone or have someone else listening to my conversation. With cell phones you never know who is listening to you on the other line. Cell phones are used for more than just talking and texting, they ar used for variety of purpose.
Social networks and cell phones can also be a burden to college professors. Instead of students taking notes on their laptops in class, they are on Facebook updating their status. There are problems of plagiarism and classroom distractions. “Cell phones used in public can create an instant audience, albeit a sometimes unwilling one” (333). It is rude to use your cell phone in certain places such as church, school, or the library because those are places where people are being focused and need peace and quiet. If someone is on their cell phone, they are most likely being loud and they are not focused on what’s going on around them. When I am on the phone I don’t pay attention to anything. One day I was in the store, I was talking on my cell phone not realizing that the lady charged me more than what I was supposed to pay, by me being on my phone I was not paying attention to what she was ringing up. It is very important that we stay off our cell phones at times where we have to really be paying attention.
Google? Facebook? Microsoft? Smartphones? Computers? We have all these things available to us at our finger tips. If something happened, to where we can’t browse the web, the world would go insane. Some people wouldn’t even know how they would get through the day. Knowing that we have to look at a book instead of quickly going to the internet would really stress us out. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t use technology. Everyone is benefiting from this resource, whether they realize it or not.