The Positive Side of Indulging in Technology

Another student wrote a very interesting blog post on the affects technology has in making us lazier as human beings and increasingly dependent on the devices we use. The blog post touched on how we’ve become so consumed by our technology that it’s created ignorance to theses new novelties in life that we experience everyday and how our generation is creating a wider gap from past generations because of technology. This post had a lot of valid points and got me thinking a lot about how YES technology has it’s downfalls, but for the most part it has always had it’s downfalls from the beginning of time and that the pro’s always highly outweigh the cons. A media ecology approach to evaluating technology, within modern times, would be to look at our environment as a whole and historically. We then must notice that it directly reflects the way we communicate and behave. Ordering food via the Internet and online shopping are “historically” what’s modern and convenient in the 2000’s. Why waste time cooking or going to a mall just to find absolutely nothing of what you were looking for when you can do it all in a few clicks of a button? Isn’t this making us smarter consumers when time is so valuable?

Technology might make some of us lazier, but it is all about the individual’s usage of it. For example I have several health and fitness apps that actually encourage me to eat better and be more active. I never have time to watch the news the old fashioned way, but with news apps and breaking updates on my iPhone I am way more informed on current events. This medium has actually changed my environment and enabled me more intelligence.

I also really hate the thought of generation gaps because they happen in every generation with the older generation supposedly being more intelligent or as the student in the previous blog post said “blissfully ignorant”. My father recently got his first iPhone and has so much trouble with it. He’ll get so frustrated trying to upload something or navigate iCloud and I joke with him and say sarcastic things like, “Wow, you must of totally outsmarted the top paid programmers at Apple if you’re finding all these glitches in their software”. The man reads a new novel every week and is very intelligent, but for some reason has the hardest time working the simplest technology, which in my opinion is just another form of reading. You scan through everything until it makes sense and perhaps he is just “blissfully ignorant” to it.

I feel as if generation gaps are going to end with this generation. We have all been pounded into our brains the severe importance of technology and how understanding it, mixed with intelligence, gives you more of an upper hand on your fellow humans than ever before. We must all find our positive niche in using technology and embrace it.