Final Blog Post

 I wish I lived in a world where our phones were just for talk and text and I mean that. At the end of the first video you asked us to watch, the narrator mentioned that the advancement of technology would be an amazing thing as long as it continues to benefit humanity and is for the benefit of humanity. I genuinely believe we are beyond the point where the advancement of some technologies can be any more beneficial as much as it continues down the path of harmfulness. I truely cannot fathom a pro that outweighs the con of increased suicide rates amongst children. 

Accessabililty is an amazing thing, dont get me wrong, however I think the over-accessibility to everything is leading to a lack of curiosity, engagement, and creating an entitlement in people that has never been seen before. Im old enough to remember what it was like growing up without a phone in my hand or a tablet on my lap. We had a family computer that my brother and I would play our learning games on for an hour or so every day, but outside of that we played outside with the neighborhood kids or make up our own games. I know phones are adored because they keep us connected from a distance, but it was the year that my parents decided to get my brother and I cell phones that we stopped spending time with all of our neighborhood friends that we grew up with. 

In the age of communication and connection, how could that have happened?

Technology and social media has opened up our world drastically. I had a best friend growing up that I met online. She was from Pakistan and lived pretty close to a war zone at the time, but she loved One Direction and I loved One Direction so we became friends instantly. She was a writer which is actually how I met her. We both wrote One Direction fan fiction online and would spend hours bouncing ideas off of each other and encoorperating it into our writing. It was a blast. I have loved making friends online since I met her. We’d all like to believe that the internet and cell phones diversify the voices we hear and the people we meet, and it does, but what we talk about less is that it has also simply allowed us to ignore any contention and diversity in our own lives in favor of finding people and thing with whom we align. 

I didn’t have much in common with any of my neighborhood friends outside of the fact that we lived in the same neighborhood. But before I had access to the entire rest of the world, proximity was enough for years of adventures and sleep overs and trips. It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about acceptance of people and that I don’t have to best friends with someone to enjoy being around with them and I dont have to have everything in common with someone for them to be my friend. Now days, I can match with someone on tinder, decide I dont like the way they text, and decide they aren’t for me and keep swiping until someone is “perfect” for me. It’s so easy to write someone off because of a single “flaw” that human interaction is becoming something disposable. That sounds like entitlement to me.

I at least have the scope to recognize it. I had a first grader on my bus last year that had both an iPad Pro and the iPhone 11. He’s an absolutely brilliant kid way beyond his years cognitively, but I worry that his brilliance will be lost to technology. The year before when he was a kindergartner, before his parents had bought him his new better-than-mine devices, he was the most extroverted kid on the bus. He’d always come sit with up upper classmen in the back of the bus (He loved that he was the only non-highschooler back there) and he’d talk about the books he was reading (almost always harry potter or captain underpants) or talking about new things he learned in class and the extensive research him and his parents did when he went home, or just ask us questions about what its like to be the big kids in school. The next year when he had his devices, he still sat in the back of the bus with us upper classmen, but he was way too absorbed in the videogames he had on his tablet. I have been shushed by a 6 year old more time than I can count on two hands. I hope he doesnt stop learning in his freetime and being curious about the world. If he does it would be a true shame and a failure of technology. It would be a brilliant mind gone to waste. We didn’t get many updates about his classes that year. 

My anecdote about my 6 year old friend Ronan highlights the epitome of what I mean when I say there is an over-accessability to technology. When he only had a computer at home and a limited time to use it, im sure he also used ot to play games but he used at least some of that time learning information, broadening his knowledge on the things that interested him. When he had access to that sort of technology 24/7 though it consumed his attention, made him more withdrawn, and kept him from having the real world experiences he used to love. My biggest qualm with cell phones is that its no longer a part of the human experience or enhance the human experience. It has become the human experience as a whole. I miss spending time with friends and not having my phone as an excuse to not listen or not pay attention and be part of the conversation. An entire hang out sesh can comprised of sitting in a room on our phones and occasionally showing each other the screen. The only "new" experiences are watching other people do new things on a screen. Technology already rules the world. And we are so dependent on it I don't think the species would survive without it. On a Blog on Workfusion about the differences and similarities between humans and robots, the writer states "Unlike humans, robots do not have experience and not have context". What does it mean if our whole experience is our phone?

It's impossible to talk about all of my thoughts on technology in a singular blog-post but this are what I see as the largest harms of technology; the loss of humanity.