It’s given us the ability to talk to people all over the world in real time from any part of the world. It’s incredible.
It’s incredible that I can choose to ignore my present company and talk to a friend separated by distance. I can choose to scan the Internet, games, tweet, upload, and update. Basically, I can choose not to be in the present world while actually still being in it.[break]
The more you engage with technology, the more you want to engage with it. It’s, after all, the opiate of the masses. For example, The Huffington Post noted on November of 2012 that 160,000 kids between the age of five and nine years are Internet-addicted in South Korea alone. Imagine the level of incarceration these children will face from their gadgets as they get older.
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For most people today, talking virtually has become more of a real thing than rejoicing in the present surroundings. June, a friend of mine, was supposedly on an exotic holiday. I pictured here having a relaxing time, away from work, away from the rush and enjoying her coconut drink underneath a palm tree. But boy, was I wrong! June would later on tell me that she spent half of her holiday online – responding to mails, networking online, and texting.
And this made me wonder: Most of us are so busy posting or uploading pictures and videos on our various social networking sites of every single thing we do that I seriously doubt if we do anything at all for the sake of self-satisfaction or for the sake of uploading a picture.
Be aware: Technology addiction is a real thing!
The Global Research, Center for Research on Globalization reports in a study by the University of Glasgow: It found that half of the study participants reported checking their email once an hour, while some individuals check up to 30 to 40 times an hour.
Overdosed with anti-tech perspective, are you? Well, hear this: The Guardian, on February 2012, wrote “Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.”
Most of the people I meet are constantly hooked on to their devices that I wonder what exactly they might be doing or whom exactly they may be “getting in touch with.” I notice people on dates, each with their own smart phone, lost in their virtual network. I notice families out for meals and most of them are usually on the phone. I notice friends out for coffee engrossed in their cell phones as well. Regardless of whether you’re out with your boyfriend/girlfriend, your family, or your friends, it appears that people prefer technology over present company.
Has the person sitting opposite you no value at all for it feels like most people would rather be honing their technology addiction than keeping the other person company? Indeed, Yahoo News writes that “A side effect of this addiction is that we also become implicitly rude, telling people in the same room as us that there are other things more important than them.”
Sure, technology is useful and helpful and wonderful. But we really ought to consider how technology is all this at the expense of something else, too: There’s always a posed danger of technology addiction, plus the danger of forgetting social etiquettes.
Time and again, let’s remind ourselves that technology is meant for us to dictate and not for technology to dictate us.
The writer is student of Political Science at Thammasat University.
basnyat.ayushma@gmail.co
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