Technology advancements have made the way things are done easier. Technology has been able to ease communications, technology makes communication easier such that one can communicate with virtually everyone just from the comfort of one’s abode, once there is an access to a computer or mobile phone. The fact that people can now sit at the same spot for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and communicate with different individuals even in the farthest parts of the world comes with its own dangers.
The first danger is that individuals will start to live a life with less interpersonal relations and social contacts. Each individual would start living in a world of their own, a world of fantasy, without the physical interference of other humans. This lack of social contacts and more of computer aided contacts will make individuals less social and will affect the way individuals interact with one another in real life. Also, it will be quite impossible to have real friends as most friends will actually be virtual friends who might not really be there when one truly needs a friend.
Secondly, spending too much time in front of the screen has a lot of health consequence, it could lead to bad eye sight due to the prolonged exposure of the eyes to screen. It could lead to obesity which occurs due to lack of mobility of the individual and the incessant consumption of junk food. It can also affect our spine and make it ill. It also results in a kind of laziness, people will only get limited to walking around their homes and won’t have reasons to go out and burn some energy. It could also lead to bad breathe as people get to speak less.
Thirdly, these advancements makes telecommuting jobs possible. Individuals can now work right from their homes and thereby have no need to meet physically with other staffs of the company they work for. Goods can now be sold without buyers physically meeting with the sellers and having the chance to check out examine physically the goods to be bought. This lack of physical communication between buyers and sellers makes frauds very easy to commit.
The other danger the reliance too much on computer for communication causes economic problems as it leads to inefficiency due to the fact that there is no physical monitoring. Less commitment. Technology makes us reach farther giving us more options but getting us less focused. This affects us in a lot of ways in that nowadays youth get involved in long distance relationships with the opposite sex, this kind of relationships are usually marred with lack of real commitments as the two lovers only gets to communicate via the computer. Also, individuals gets easily distracted due to the availability of lots of options at the same points in time.
Another danger is that of cyberbullying, in a study carried out by Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin it was made clear that many youths and kids make use of the internet as a platform for bullying others. The internet technology offers bullies a great platform to showcase their bullying talent and also enables them to bully much more kids than they can ever imagine” (Hinduja & Patchin, 2010c, p. 1).
In conclusion, technology has succeeded in helping us get things done better and faster but the advent of computer aided communication is taking away the real social life and physical interactions from humanity. Also, it is also having some negative impacts on our health and the way our habits are formed. So obviously, when technology solve a problem for us another problem automatically arises. Whether technology is making our lives easier or creating more problems for us only depends on the way we react and interact with these new technologies. However, if only we can allow technology to ease our life and restrict ourselves to the quality it brings along rather than the quantity, and if we can learn to use these technology to our greatest advantage always and do away with the disadvantages we will surely keep benefitting from the advents of technology.
Works Cited
Julia Beliak. Is Technology Making Our Lives EasierOr just adding more stress?
Women’s Forum in France 2013. 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 28 Jan. 2014. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com>
CNN.com. Technology Replacing Personal Interactions At What Cost. 01 Mar. 2011. Web.
28 Jan. 2014. <http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/03/technology-replacing-personal-interactions-at-what-cost/>
Hinduja, Sameer., & Patchin, Justin. Cyberbullying: Identification, Prevention, and Response.
Cyberbullying Research Center. 2010
Sherry Turkle. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each
Other. Cambridge, Mass. 2010
