Due to our inherent fear of anomie, individuals dependence on technology is increasing at the rate of its advancement. Matthew Crawfords , The World beyond Your Head, elaborates on his notion, by making the claim that members in todays society lack the ability to effectively focus on stimulating content that is not paired with technology. Crawfords notion is supported by a plethora of situations where people have proved attentiveness weak, because of a technological source. If you think about Albert Einstein words, it is very true that the day he feared for is already here, where technology has surpassed our human interaction thus having a world with generation of idiots.
Technology is designed to make the world a better place and help us accomplish things are impossible without technology. Although technology is meant to make this world a better place, it is leaving no room for creativity. Creativity is what makes us unique as individuals as we are able to come up with our own original ideas and proposals. Creativity is a mental process involved in discovering new concepts or renovation of existing ideas through a conscious or unconscious process. It concludes that we are designed to function in a particular way. If our design is meant to function in one particular way like technology, then where is the originality and creativity? What will become of our minds if we rely on technology for documenting sorting and storing information? According to psychologists, recording everything we do takes us out of the current situations and making us less thoughtful people.
There is a lot of tension mostly on youths in regards to technology. A recent study conducted shows that in 2020, the brains of multitasking young adults are wired in a different way from those of age 35 and above and its disadvantageous. Due to the dependence on technology, humans lack the ability to retain information, as most of their time is spend sending short messages on social media, waiting to be entertained and being distracted away from deep engagement conversation with people. There is lack of face- to -face social skills, lack of deep thinking capacity and more dependence on unhealthy ways of mobile devices to function.
Instead of using technology as a tool, we use it as a way to escape reality. It is making us become dumb. For instance, calculators help in making our work easy but instead make us lazy. From the time we entered school; simple mathematics was drilled in us. The higher we went up in terms of class levels, the more complex calculations and the more did our dependence on calculators become. We have become lazy to the extent that we must use calculators even on the simplest calculations. In addition, cell phones have made us lose our memory. Grasping a single contact on our memory is very difficult as have become dependent on the phone memory. When thinking about the break down list, technology has become more of a headache than help. When there is technology breakdown, peoples lives become a mess and go haywire; we seem to have a mental breakdown. As stated by Crawford, our mental lives have become shapeless and more susceptible to anything that presents itself out of the ether.
Technology is making us dumber day by day without our knowledge. For example GPS coordinates gets us lost. Before technology, one has a strategic plan on how to get to a certain place without getting lost. A map had to come in handy and if there is no map, one had to locate a gas station, school or any indicators available. With the technology; GPS, travelling is much easier. The problem comes in when the GPS fails to work right and you go 5 wrong paths. This is how technology has corrupted our lives in such a way that it makes us less intelligent. Once we take away this luxury of technology, people will have a hard time adjusting whereas others will not survive. From paying bills through the phone, people will to go back to registered business to pay bills and retail outlets for shopping.
Technology has overtaken our humanity and we are no better than that technology we have created ourselves. Einstein is very particular when he says a person starts living, when he lives outside himself. We have become anti- social individuals who do not care about each other but we are highly self- centered. Due to the internet, we can post, review and delete whatever we post without the worry of saying the wrong thing. When faced with a face to face scenario, we simply cannot delete or change what we said wrong. Real connections among people are easily lost.
Technology has also created a deepening dependence on interconnected networks for us to get through each day. Crawford said that our attention is directed to a shared world; it is for this reason that ones attention is simply not his own reason being its objects are also present to others as well. We have engaged in many social group teams to the extent that we do not realize that our privacy has been invaded. We want to feel connected to others through social networks by describing how we feel, where we are and what we are doing. We have become dependent on others on the social network platform. Other than social networks, technology has taken over our lives where we depend on smart phones to wake us up each morning. In case of any breakdowns in the technology, the damage can be massive; for example loses of a job since the alarm did not ring, in return you get fired.
As humans we cannot keep up with all the technology that we have created. Technology is becoming unmanageable by the human brain. Research has shown that the computers may get smarter through good programming, machine learning and use of sophisticated chips. Wonder what would happen if computers became artificially intelligent where they are self-reliant and self-aware. If that can happen, humans can be totally controlled by computers or taken out of existence. Technology has already rendered us useless since we do not want to use our mind to think. Artificial computers can then take us out since we are of no use. Crawford says that we can only flourish as individuals when we acquire skills that bring us in contact with the real physical world. Crawford said that suppressing the environment is dangerous reason being the feature of the environment that should control the action is ignored. Humans should let the nature take its course, by allowing technology work its part and humans their part. If we try to control the technology, it is instead controlling us.
Works Cited
Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. , 2015. Print.
Feist, Richard, Rajesh Shukla, and Chantal Beauvais. Technology and the Changing Face of Humanity. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010. Print.
Honea C., Americans Too Dependent on Technology, February 1999;
http://cyberbuzz.gatech.edu/nique/issues/winter1999/2.26.99/eds5.html
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