Technology in Today's World
A recent car commercial featured a twenty-something woman who expressed pity that her parents had only nineteen Facebook friends, while she herself had several hundred. The humor in the commercial lies in its irony. The young woman is in a room alone with her computer and some stuffed animals on the shelves behind her while her parents, not lonely at all, are shown biking with their peers. The commercial certainly evokes a smile, but it also makes a serious point about technology in the twenty-first century. For many people, particularly those of the younger generation, there is the illusion of connectedness with the ready availability of portable devices from smart phones to ultra-thin laptops to tablet computers. Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and those to whom we are "linked in" may not be people we know well at all. These social media sites, and others, can create in some people a false sense of intimacy where none really exists. Technology has led us to the point where we're sharing thoughts and feelings instantaneously "at the expense of cultivating the ability to be alone and to manage and contain one's emotions" (Turkle 2007).
We live in "techno-enthusiastic times" (Turkle 2007). People love their gadgets and feel lost if they have to go without a wi-fi connection. With the acquisition of gadgets has come the decline of social skills: people abandon friends in the middle of a face-to-face conversation to answer a cell phone call or respond to an email alert. It is not unusual to go to a restaurant and see a family waiting for their meal, each person engaged with a different device rather than with each other. In 2007, Sherry Turkle wrote "High school and college students give up their privacy on MySpace about everything from musical preferences to sexual hang-ups." Though MySpace has yielded to Facebook and Twitter in the social media stakes, the net outcome is the same as it was five years ago. Young people are sharing a considerable amount of personal information and do not seem...
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