The impact of technology

Each time we study technology in class, almost every year since primary school, I find it more interesting. This year we studied its positive and negative consequences, how it reaches every part of the society and how it can impact our daily lives. People see technology as the greatest thing that has ever happened to humankind but what I want to emphasize is the negative impact it has.


The impact of technology in almost all the people in the world is incredible. We notice it mostly in the behaviour of children, how they see things that we did not know about until a couple of years ago, as every day things. It is unbeleivable that a three year old boy says after taking a picture, “Let me see”and runs to the camera to take a look. Or that a girl who is only five can say, “Please,let me play Play Station”. The point is, that it is amusing how technology is being progressively incorporated into daily lives.

As everything in life, this impact has good and bad consequences on societies.
The improvement in some areas, like communication, is overwhelming. Thanks to the telephone you can have a conversation with anybody who is in any part of the world. Nowadays, through Internet, we can buy things without leaving home,search for information, or even study and get a degree. It seems that the impact of technology is the best thing that ever happened to human beings, but, is it really like that?

For almost everybody, life is easier now, but they do not realize that it is causing a huge dependency on technology. This dependency is not good, because as we have everything done by technology, we become more sedentary. This is happening a lot among young people who are not used to reading a complete book. It is easier to read summaries from the Internet than spending time reading. Time they can spend playing video games or chatting with friends.
It is the wrong use of technology that leads us to negative aspects of it. Not only because we become lazier but because of the lack of privacy we can perceive. The most exposed are young people who publish their pictures on the Internet so that anybody who is surfing con have access to them.They do not realise they are allowing the intrusion by publishing them. They only think about having fun. The Internet is not always a safe place as it is a sort of spider web where everything is connected and so companies know which sites are visited every time you log in.
Another consequence of the wrong use of technology is that children in many cases do not need help from other people so they start isolating themselves with the computer and they even stop frequenting their friends because they can comunicate with them through the Internet or cellphone. The family is, of course, left a side too.

As the Internet has become part of our daily life, the cellphone also has. Everybody has one in fact, many of the users are young children. Something that no one is aware of is that it can violate your privacy as the cameras in them are taken as the phone itself, everywhere, and so anybody can take a picture whenever and wherever they want. Also, the cellphone companies, as the Internet, can know exactly what number you are calling and what messeges you send.
Other very popular device these days are the MP3 players. They allow us to listen to our favorite songs whenever and wherever we want. The negative aspect of these devices is that some people isolate themselves, listening to their music even when they are in social meetings or walking next to someone on the street.

And a really worrying consequence of technology is that today’s students are no longer the people educational systems were designed to teach years ago. Marc Presky, specialist in the subject, explains that, “Today’s students have changed amusingly from those of the past. A really big discontinuity has taken place. This discontinuity is the result of the arrival of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th Century”. Today’s students represent the first generations to grow up with all the new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by, and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cellphones, and all the other toys and tools of this digital age we are living in. People refer to this new generation as “digital natives”and say they are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. The rest of the people, those who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in their lives, become fascinated by, and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be, compared to them as digital immigrants. Marc also says that, “It is very serious, because the single biggest problem racing education today is that our digital immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language”. Of course, it is not easy for grown ups to feel into the digital natives’ world.

As I have mentioned through out the text, there is a huge number of negative aspects of technology that we are not aware of. This lack of capacity to descern this negativity is one of the characteristics of the new digital era. Era in which we are so familiar and dependent on technology that we do not realise that it has terrible consequences in ourselves and the society that sorround us. We must continue using technology because it helps us in an overwelming way but we must also learn to find a balance so that our lives progress and yet our humanity does also.