Is Society Becoming Too Dependent on Their Technological Devices? By Jaime Witting

Everywhere you look, whether it be at the bus stop, your school, or at a red light, you are bound to witness individuals with their pupils dilated and jaws dropped, as the light from their phone screen illuminates their faces. That being said, it is apparent that advances in technology are occurring daily, leading us to various advances. However, it often appears as if society has integrated technology into every aspect of human life, to the point where we cannot live without it. Therefore, too much dependence on technological devices, like cell phones, may ultimately overrun our lives, abolish our ability to think for ourselves, and make us more antisocial.

are we too reliant on them to perform our daily tasks?

Picture this, you are sleeping when out of the blue the rambunctious blaring of the alarm coming from your phone jars you out of your peaceful sleep. As you get ready, you begin to blast some of your favorite jams from your phone. Soon enough, you're at work, and you have just used your cell phone to send an email to a client, which you now know is grammatically correct, since you had the help of spell check. However, you soon become bored, so what do you do? Pull out your phone and visit the multitude of social media accounts that you possess on your phone. Now, its 3:00 and it’s time for lunch, after having glanced at My Fitness Pal, an application on your phone that can count your daily calorie intake, you realize you should choose a healthier option for lunch. So, you go to the internet and search for restaurants near by. Once you find a place, you submit the address into Google Maps, and before you know it you have arrived at your destination. After you eat, you pull out your phone and purchase your meal with Apple Pay, which enables users to effortlessly make payments on-the-go.

Many of you may relate to this since many use their phones throughout the day for a multitude of tasks. After all, phones have become a prominent figure in our everyday life, causing numerous individuals to claim they “would die without their cell phone” or that they “couldn’t last a day without it.”

Are they Making Us Become Antisocial?

Are they causing us to talk less among our peers?

Just think about the countless times you have gone somewhere and observed individuals standing next to each other on their phones, and not talking. This is a result of the lack of face-to-face contact with others due to the fact that individuals are always staring down at their phone or other technological devices. One study shows that the average person spends at least 90 minutes a day on their phone, that adds up to a whopping 3.9 years of a person’s life.

So How "Social" Is Social Media?

If you think the other statistics were bad, the average person spends about an additional 100 minutes glancing through these networks daily. That is almost two hours that could be spent going out and enjoying your time with friends and family. Not to mention, social media makes us less social due to the fact that we no longer need to call, meet up with, or write a letter to someone, to see how they have been. Instead, one could just simply log on to their social media account and check to see what they have recently posted.

Are they contributing to nullifying our ability to think critically?

For example, when was the last time you researched a topic with a book or actual article? Most likely you haven't in a long time. Instead, you probably just withdrew your phone or tablet, and persisted in searching it on the internet, resulting in an immediate answer. By googling a topic, plagiarizing and gathering other’s ideas, is just the press of a button away. Not to mention, trivial appliances like calculators or spell checks are consistantly depended on.

even though technological devices seem like they are just there for convenience, we truly depend on them.

In conclusion, society has incorporated technology into every aspect of daily life, however, we shouldn't allow it to dictate our lives. Thus, as rapid as the advancement in technology is, and as beneficial as it may appear, it is ultimately resulting in society becoming too dependent on it. Therefore, technological devices may eventually overrun our lives, destroy our critical thinking, and make us more antisocial. That being said, technology shouldn't eliminate the personal nature of physical relationships and communication, and it should be used only to improve efficiency in human life aspects, without replacing them.

This CORRESPONDS with what Albert Einstein had once stated, “I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots."

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