When I was younger, I was always with technology whether it was on my moms or dads cell phone or even on the computer at school. There is always technology around us and it is getting worse as we speak. From a college student, all you see when you walk into a classroom, you see students that are on their phones and even the teacher are beginning to do it also. I feel technology is getting more savvy as we speak and it is helping us, but when all of the students and even the teachers are on their phones, it is very scary. I’m not trying to put down technology and say it has done us nothing for the past 10 years, but what I am saying we need to converse more face to face, because if we do not it will look scarier in the next couple of years.
Technology can be both a positive and negative influence in a person’s life. It can give people the latest news updates and connect people separated by distance like a sister in college. However, technology can be a great distraction for people. Some can get so involved in technology that they become addicted to it. This makes them become distraction from interacting with others within the community such as in the school cafeteria or even in a classroom. Technology, like iPhones and iPods, isolate people socially as well from the world around them. Technology decreases social interaction in the real world. The use of social apps has tremendously gone up, there are more apps that people use to interact with people on their devices, rather than in person. The apps that I am talking about is Snapchat, Facebook, or even meeting people on dating apps like Tinder. This is a problem in today's society because people are not talking to each other in the world face to face, they only communicate on their devices. I have seen kids snapchatting other kids in the same room. They might be commuting back and forth, but not face to face. The kids remain in their own little world not caring what others are doing in the classroom. Technology has made people not interact with others where in the 1900’s people use to talk on the phone or in person.
Technology can also narrow your view of the world. If you are always on your phone, how do you know what’s going on in life? When individuals like myself who spend a lot of time on the phone, it takes away from learning what’s going on in the world today. While people who are on their phones, and are so concentrated on what’s going on in the phone, they aren’t getting themselves exposed to the real world. The people might hear it on their social media apps, but they might not be getting the full story, because every story has a different side to it. For example in the Michael Brown case, people were protesting and saying “hands up don’t shoot”. It turned out to me a myth while social media continued to push the narrative which was proven to be totally incorrect. Much destruction of property and now “black lives matter” evolved from this false narrative. Another example is the evolution of ISIS. These terrorist used social media to recruit young naive men and women to young their group and kill innocent people, because of social media and also the exposure it gives them they have been successful and many innocent people have died, most recently in Paris and Africa.
Another concern about technology is that is can lead to negative behavior. People in this society abuse the internet, they also use it in a negative way and for bad purposes such as cyber bullying over the internet, and use information against each other. From what has gone in the past such as cyberbullying, it can ruin people’s lives and can bring the victim who’s bullying over the internet to jail for the rest of their lives. Can I say anything else? The list goes down the list of these terrible acts and it needs to stop.