Side Effects of Advancements in Technology

Technology could be anything extending from a wooden pencil to a touchscreen laptop.

Technology could relate to anything simple such as a house, chair, or water bottle. However, more likely than not when a person hears the word “technology”, he or she immediately thinks of the latest apple product or the new and enlarged Samsung Galaxy. Technology has both helped and hurt our society. People have developed so much and become so advanced through technology that one might often wonder whether or not it is actually beneficial to the human society. While technology may seem like a gift, many arguments can be made in favor of simplicity being more beneficial to the human condition.

The most defined change that comes with technology is gradual lack of people communicating face to face. Now, it is just so much easier to text a question or reply to someone via phone or social network. Before, people talked during dinner time and did not gobble down food so they could go to their computers as soon as possible. A sixteen year old boy Sherry Turkle interviewed stated that “[he’d] like to learn how to have a conversation” because all he know is how to use his phone to text other people. Being able to talk to others is becoming more and more of a desired, but not easily acquired skill as the time passes by. As Turkle says, “we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble”; we are just too busy on Facebook looking at Vine videos nowadays. Yet, if humans were focused off a simpler society with less technology, they would not have the increasingly important problem of people not communicating properly.

As humans delve deeper and deeper into the technological trap, they become ensnared in the dumber and dumber ages. The height of one’s vocabulary dramatically decreases when online, because “we dumb down our communications, even on the most important of matters”. We start to stop using proper grammar, a skill almost all people loose when connecting on the internet. People gradually start dumbing themselves down to the point where they are not at the level of intelligence they should have been less than half a century ago. Despite having great technology for research and the developing of people’s brains, humans more often than not misuse it; instead of working on that research paper, the student is goofing off watching cat videos on YouTube. In his or her free time, he or she might opt for a quick game of Halo instead of studying for that test coming up in a couple of days. People say the advancements made in technology should make their society smarter, but if anything, research has shown that years ago, people were more intelligent without all the fancy bells and whistles available today.

It is fairly easy to live without technology. Henry David Thoreau even pointed out that “[he] could easily do without the post office” which was one of the greater technological advances of his time. Instead of complaining about what slow internet one has, he or she should instead be complaining about how unconstructive the internet has become in the first place. We “live with such hurry and waste… life” because of technology and its harmful blessing in disguise. Opting for simplicity would not only be a much more valid, favorable solution to the problems of lack of communication and deceasing of intelligence, but also a simple solution.