Codependency and Technology

Holly Owens

As technology begins to ingrain itself further and further into our lives, rather than it just helping us, we in turn have become it’s assistants as well. It has become our responsibility to encourage development of new technology and to guide it in a way that is helpful to our society. We have developed a codependency between what we need from technology and what it needs from. Kevin Kelly asks the question “what does technology want?” He goes further to explain technology wants what we want; to advance and evolve. We create and use technology to make our own lives easier, while at the same time directing technology down the path it naturally wants to go.

This codependency between technology and us has gone even further by it changing the way we think, act, learn, and even the way we make choices. Articles we have read throughout the course of this semester have made one thing pretty clear: due to neuroplasticity and the new stimulations caused by technology, our brains have changed. The book The Digital Divide explains how our generation now learns in new faster paced ways, with decreased attention spans. I often find myself in lectures looking around, wanting to read ahead, get on the internet, or just about anything but focus my attention on one thing for a long amount of time. Technology has not only changed the way we communicate and socialize, but it has also greatly increased our dependency on it. Technology has added convenience while chipping away concentration.



Technology without a doubt has now taken over the society we live in; however, I don’t view this negatively. I can see how Mark Bauerlein could make the generalization about our generation becoming the dumbest due to how media and social oriented we have become. On the other hand, I really believe without the availability of technology I wouldn’t know half of the information I do or even have access to it. Through technology I can look up for instance who the 23rd president of the Unites States was, everything he accomplished and his whole life story in seconds, something that would have taken hours in the past. While technology definitely can be misused, I really believe a large portion of our generation appreciates and utilizes the benefits technology has to offer, not just to keep up to date on gossip.


Sources:

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=2110cff8-de56-49c6-9ea2-28905494478a%40sessionmgr12&vid=4&hid=113

The Digital Divide, Google image, Pinterest

Dumbestgerneration.com, The Digital Divide