Wired and Tired

Nick Krawiec

10/11/10

English Composition

Wired and Tired

It doesn’t matter where you go anymore, technology will be waiting for you. You can’t walk into a room without seeing at least one cell phone, laptop or iPod. We use technology to cook our food, to wash our clothes and take us from one place to another. We even use it to talk to each other when we’re in the next room. At what point is it enough? Are our lives easier now than they were fifty years ago? Perhaps marginally, but does it justify our constant reliance on electronic gadgets to do our work for us? It is nice to be able to simplify certain parts of our lives, and sometimes technology really helps with that, but after a while it can reach a breaking point. As a society, we are too reliant on technology to help us live our lives. Just because we can have something do our work for us doesn’t always mean we should.

One area of our lives in which we have become too reliant on technology is organization. We use things like cell phones and PDAs to plan all sorts of things throughout our daily life. We use laptops to organize our schoolwork, business and even our taxes. If for some reason any of these things were to crash, many of us would find ourselves completely lost. It’s nice to have everything kept all in one neat, orderly place the way computers do, but there is a point at which it’s important to keep yourself engaged with your life and not just your planner. We oftentimes use these devices as a way to keep track of things for us, with convenient features like alerts and alarms that notify us when something needs doing. The problem is, if you become too reliant on things like that and they get taken away, you’ll suddenly have to juggle much more than you’re used to and that can end up being extremely stressful.

Another technological advancement our society relies too heavily on is the internet. You can do almost anything online, from getting your groceries delivered to filling your prescriptions. Lately, even public schools have been putting up classes in an online format. Sometimes this sort of thing can be very convenient. Who wants to have to go to the store every single time they want to buy a CD, book or movie? However, the issue with doing everything online is that most of the time you don’t have to say a single word to another human being. Think about that for a second. You can do almost anything you could dream of online, but most of the time you do it all without speaking or interacting with anything but a binary machine. What is a life like this going to do to our children, or their children? Are we creating a society of hermits who only meet to work or mate? Maybe it won’t go that far, but there is something to be said about actually being able to interact with another person. For one thing, they actually have a common sense function built in (most of the time….).

Communication is another area in which we over do it when it comes to technology. Most of the time, advances in this field are fantastic. Cell phones have changed the way we live our daily lives. Email keeps us instantly in touch with each other. Skype is especially amazing because you can actually have a face to face conversation with anyone in real-time no matter where you both are located. All of this is wonderful, and makes our lives more enjoyable and easier with consistency. Unfortunately, it also just happens to be ruining the English language as we know it.

Whether we’re using instant messaging, Twitter, texting or emails, we tend to use acronyms and slang to help get our point across faster. Sometimes, when all you need to say is a one or two-word answer, this is a good thing. Sadly, many people have begun to abuse internet slang, and now you get entire sentences with numbers and shortened words just so someone could save a couple of seconds. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem with future generations, because more kids will grow up spending much more time texting their friends than they will writing in a formal format. This is highly destructive in a grammatical sense. When you do something over and over it becomes second nature. Especially with children, it will become difficult to make a distinction between proper grammar and texting grammar. Considering English is such a universal language, you’d think we’d have a little more respect for it as a society.

Entertainment is also wreaking havoc on our ability to read and write. Ask a kid if he’s heard of the city of Troy, and he’ll most likely say “You mean like in the movie with Brad Pitt?” Movies and television are such an effective distraction that more and more people are reading less and less. Newspapers are on the decline; CNN and the internet keep people updated by the minute, not every 24 hours, so why bother? They say people “read” more magazines than ever, but the word “read” is used incredibly loosely there. If by “read” you mean “look at lots of pictures of celebrities and advertisements with about 5 sentences per page,” then you’d be a lot closer to the mark. At the rate Hollywood churns out movies made from books, we’ll be seeing an on-screen adaptation of “Goodnight Moon” any day now.

So why is reading on the decline? Well, most people will weigh their options. Will I take a couple days to read a book, or get the whole thing told to me in two hours and get to see explosions and sex, to boot? Clearly, our society is choosing the latter option. It’s easier and much more time-effective, so why not? The problem here is that movies take almost all of the imagination out of the way we tell our stories. It de-humanizes them and makes them into just another person’s depiction of what happened. When you read, you create a world all your own around the story you are being told. It pulls you in, and you decide what the characters look like and how they sound, not a producer or director. Stories have survived for as long as humanity has had culture. They have been passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth or on paper, allowing us to use our imagination to interpret what we learn. Technology has taken that part of story-telling away from us. We still pass down stories, but now they’re on Blu-Ray instead of in our hearts and minds, and there is something fundamentally disturbing about that.

So what does all this tell us about technology? Is it the boogeyman? Should we stay away from it at all costs? Of course not, but it does create a unique problem that our society has never really had before. Our technology de-humanizes us. It is a strange relationship for us to have with something we’ve invented. Even as it gives us back time while it makes our lives more simple, it is also taking away exactly what makes us human. When we rely on technology to do too much for us, we risk losing our identities. It’s one thing to use technology to help you stay in touch with your friends and family halfway across the world, but it’s another entirely to use it to teach our children or tell our stories. There is a difference between using technology to make little things easier and using technology to live your life. We only live once, so doesn’t it make sense that we should do the living, not our gadgets?