Technology Makes Us Lonely: The Negatives of the Progress

There’s food on the table, with many people surrounding it ready to dig into a big family dinner, but wait everyone’s heads are down. What are they doing, are they praying, or are they really invested in a very lengthy book or Epic, like Beowulf? No, of course, they are focused on their phones and laptops. Technology has been around for as long as man has existed. However, technology has grown rapidly as an industry at an incredible rate over the past decade. Previously, most types of technology were originally created to help people, save lives, and light up a light bulb. But recent technological advances help people less and harm them more. Technology has turned, once social and outdoorsy people, into lonely people trying to find comfort within their phones and other screen technology. Because of this people have no other social life or identity outside of their screens. Recent technological advances have been incredible to see grow and prosper, but they have had an overall bad effect on people, giving us an easy way out of hard work, becoming an addiction that is very hard to let go, and disconnecting us from people and making us feel lonely.

The overuse of technology has left us unskilled and made us more dependent than ever on technology. In the past, or the “Old days” People relied on oneself to get any job done. Now in the twenty first century people rely on technology to do everything for them. “cell phones have been in use now for about 20 years. Believe it or not, before the mid-1990’s, most of the general public had no cell phones.”(Shawn Jackson and Reg L. Carver). Many manufacturing companies and other workplaces have evolved from making things by had to working on the machines to make goods for them. In the office place a job that used to not exist is mostly consisted of “workers” working on a laptop, making phone calls, or sending emails. This for one makes work easier for people, but most people who work these jobs get extremely bored with them, and end up wishing they had spent more of their life actually doing something. Even if these people did try to get out of technology workplaces they would have to go somewhere like alaska, or in the middle of nowhere to escape from technology. Technology has convinced today’s society that it is cool and that the outdoors are something only crazy or outlandish people would spend their time in, this is shown a lot on television show’s.

too many people, particularly young people who haven’t known life without mobile phones, the Internet, or iPods, equate computer and communication technology with life. They spend hours listening to music, watching YouTube, texting, tweeting, and playing games on line. This technology certainly gives us an easy distraction from the pressures or just plain mundanity of daily life. (Dr. Jim Taylor,

Technology not only shows us that the outdoors are not as fun but it makes us forget the outdoors almost to where some people have forgotten what it actually means to survive by fending for ones own food and well being. Instead we rely on technology to fight for us. Technology gives us food, water, heating, entertainment, transportation, and it even thinks for use and helps us remember things. Take alexa for example, alexa is advertised that it can answer almost any question, it can play any song, it can create a schedule for you, and it can control the heating units and the lights in your house. The consumers of today’s technology have evolved tremendously, when technology first came out it was small and not as effective as it is now, but with technology one can tell that technology was not a done on accident. There is always going to be a problem with technology not working or doing as much as humanity wants, so therefor the biggest problem in today’s society, on whether technology is good or bad, is the consumer.( Albert Lou, 14:43)

Technology has given us an option that seems to be a fix for our problems, but it’s overuse has made technology addictive and it has taken the place of the healthier solutions to our problems. A lot technology is used by adults doing jobs on the computer, but there are a large amount of people who use technology for other things, for example gamers. Gamers can spend many hours playing their games and not even notice they played all day and didn’t get anything done.(Phil Owen) Many gamers have confessed to this happening to the, this has in fact happened to me. One big problem with gamers is that they use games to relieve some of their problems off their minds. The was a study by Dr. Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University, and he studied the habits of gamers in singapore he found that he “was expecting to find that the depression led to gaming,' Gentile told me. 'But we found the opposite in that study. The depression seemed to follow the gaming. As kids became addicted—if you want to use that word—then their depression seemed to get worse. And, as they stopped being addicted, the depression seemed to lift.'(Phil Owen) Depression is of course related to being lonely and this study has shown that gaming can lead to depression but the reason for that is simple, being addicted to something that controls your life as much as gaming does, makes one feel lonely. If gamers don’t have friends outside of their gaming friends they feel like there is no real connection to them other than a screen. People find using technology is a way to push their internal feelings down so they don’t have to deal with them. Also when there is social situation we usually talk about technology when one can’t find anything to talk about or we just avoid the conversation by being on technology. Gaming is just another way of avoiding social interaction and being addicted to it can and probably will lead to some form of depression.

“Dr. Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University. He, and a handful of other researchers, performed a study a few years back. In this study, they looked at the gaming habits of schoolchildren in Singapore over the course of two years to try to determine if what they refer to as 'pathological gaming' has an impact on the subjects' lives and mental health.They found a definite correlation between heavy gaming and symptoms of depression.”

Technology is used differently by the youth and older age groups. “Young adults also use text messaging as their primary method of contacting friends – over 80 percent report texting as their preferred method. Older adults (over age 50) prefer calling or email.”(Ira E. Hyman, Jr., Ph.D.,) This does seem obvious because the older generations were not raised around technology. This generation is centered around technology and it’s advances. Often times this a reason why children, in social situations, are portrayed as being on there phones all the time. There are times when one may see an entire family or group on their phones. (Michael Gonchar)

Technology as a whole has disconnected us from people in our everyday lives and has developed a big problem of social awkwardness. Take social media for example, social media is meant to help people create friendships from far away. This sounds all fine and dandy, but as time goes on one will get frustrated because there is no face to face interaction then giving you one less friend. Social media also allows us to present ourselves in any light we want to giving us full control over our appearance. We enjoy being able to be in control over our lives, through social media. We also have control over where our attention is through social media, usually it’s stuff that interests us. When we are in a social situation where there is something that peaks our interest we listen, but when there is something that doesn’t peak our interest we tend to not focus on that and instead focus on our phones. This is a way that we control our lives, by controlling what we listen to and don’t listen to. People these days can’t get enough friends from far away, but they can choose how many friends they have from afar this may again make them feel good for the time being but that friendship most likely won’t last. The problem with social situations that people who have big social media accounts, or spend a lot of time on social media, have is that there is not much they can do to control their appearance or where the conversation will go.(Sherry Turkle) This makes them socially awkward because they can’t control it making them made at themselves for not having a real social life outside of social media, making them feel as if they are alone. There are also now intimate relationships that happen through social media and technology and at least 25% of young adults and teens have stated that they have in fact ended a relationship over texting or other forms of communication.(Ira E. Hyman, Jr., Ph.D.,) Students have become more and more likely to be socially awkward as technology has progressed. As a principle of a school put it:

“The internet is hurting our students’ ability to work in groups. Teachers struggle to get them to participate in team assignments. Instead, they would prefer to stare at their computer. I do see them talking to one another in the hallway, I see young girls who are socially aggressive or even inappropriate. I personally believe that the internet is stunting their social skills and making it more difficult for them to deal with others in the real world.”

Technology has turned people into more social people because of the benefits technology has of connecting us to other people. Technology has produced many great things in the past, one of which is the cell phone. The cell phone allows us to come in contact with anyone we want from far away. This makes us more social because we can have conversations with multiple people from around the globe. Skype is another way to communicate with people allowing for people to see each others faces. Because of social media we are able to make more friends that we can’t make in everyday life. Social media also introduces us to new places around the world, encouraging us to go out and go to those places, meet new people, and to try different, fun things. 'Generally, when people feel socially excluded, they seek out other ways of compensating, like exaggerating their number of Facebook friends or engaging in prosocial behaviors to seek out interaction with other people,' says Jenny Olson,” ( Melissa Matthews). Technology has also increased political efficacy dramatically, by informing us of what is going on in the world and allowing us to communicate with other people allowing us to form our own ideas about politics. Technology also gives something for people to do, it gives them an opportunity to learn and grow as people. Facebook is one of the best examples for connecting people. “people who use Facebook multiple times a day are 43 percent more likely than other Internet users to feel that most people can be trusted. They have about 9 percent more close relationships and are 43 percent more likely to have said they would vote.” (Megan Gambino).

Because of technology it has made people all around more educated in classes and it has encouraged people to make a name for themselves through social media. Technology as a whole has very encouraging effects on the health and well being of people, which is based on being connected to many people around the world, through social media accounts, and through texting and email. (Megan Gambino)

Technology has in fact helped humanity as a whole grow, but it has converted us into less social beings, because we hide behind our phone and computers instead of getting up and off our technology and doing something. When we facetime or call people we are having a conversation with them, but it’s not a conversation that is face to face and the reason face to face conversations are important is that they allow people to feel each other's presence and feel what problems they are having. A simple hug or high five feels real, but you can’t do that over a phone call. Social media has helped in the fact that it has increased political efficacy, but the friends one makes on social media aren’t real friends because you’ve never really met them or experienced the type of person they are. “Increasingly, the physical is being replaced by the digital, which is fundamentally changing our experiences of the everyday, and in turn, reducing our opportunities to connect.”( Chris Allen). Society has developed from communicating through personal contact, to creating a connection through technology. Technology has just given us something to do instead of focus on what we can do to better ourselves.

Technological advances have been incredible to see grow and prosper, but technology has given us an easy way out of hard work, it has become an addiction that is very hard to let go, and it has disconnected us from people making us feel lonely. The overuse of technology has left us unskilled and made us more dependent than ever on technology. Technology has given us an option that seems to be a fix for our problems, but it’s overuse has made technology addictive and it has taken the place of the healthier solutions to our problems. Technology as a whole has disconnected us from people in our everyday lives and has developed a big problem of social awkwardness. Sure technology has helped humanity live longer and allow us to travel, but mentally it has left us socially awkward and left us unwilling to get out and change who we are by distracting us from ourselves. Although Technology was created to help humanity succeed, it has taken a toll on our social life, outside of tech based services, like social media and youtube. Most people now a days check their phone around 150 times a day and 46 percent of smartphone users say they don’t feel like they can live without their phones. (JANE E. BRODY). Technology was originally made to help us, but has turned into something that has crippled people's minds and has taken away a large amount of who we are as people. People don’t need to get rid of technology, but learn how to manage their use of technology in our lives.