The Problem Of Technology Making Us More Alone

Is technology really helping us in everyday life, or is it slowly taking over our lives? To many people, smartphones and social media are amazing as they enable us to connect with people around the world and make a difference in everyday life in all aspects of society, but others believe that they are taking over our lives and preventing us from being independent.

Today, smartphones changing the way we live. With everyone connected by phones and social media it is now easier to communicate with people. Our life revolves around technology and we can now control our heating and lights from our smartphones. A smartphone can do almost everything, they are designed to make our lives easier. For example, we can watch live TV, it allows us to find restaurants near a location or calculate how long it will take us to get home. Also, if we lost the TV remote, we can turn our phone into a TV remote and use it instead. Moreover, we can access to our email, social media and network, ether we are at home or traveling.

However, people believe that the technology leads them to be less social, for example, smartphones can lead people to have poor social skills and they struggle to read body language in other people. It is also stealing kids and teenager’s childhood. Smartphones changes the way kids socialize and interact with others, which can have huge impacts on their mental and emotional well-being. In a recent publication, it was noted that 56 percent of children between the ages of 10 to 13 own a smartphone. While that fact alone may come as a shock, it is estimated that 25 percent of children between the ages of 2 and 5 have a smartphone. (Psychcentral)

Moreover, our privacy might be endangered, to give an example, online app store Google Play has already discovered apps that are abusing their access to smartphones sensors. Google recently booted 20 apps from Android phones and its app store. Those apps could record with the microphone, monitor a phone’s location, take photos and then extract the data. And they could do all of this without a user’s knowledge. (Temming)

The ability to communicate clearly and effectively is one of the main skills that people have. The use of social media can be a great opportunity for people from anywhere to connect with anyone despite the location. Also, users have the chance to share through social media their issues with the community to get help, such as Facebook.

On the other hand, social media have a dark side where it can easily ruin someone’s reputation just by creating a false story and spreading across the social media. According to Newsfeed, there are many ways were employees can harm a company's brand even when it’s not from a company's official social media account. As Taco Bell - Employee posts picture on Facebook in which he is urinating on nachos, the employee got fired, but the damage has already been done. It will be difficult not to associate taco bell with urine-soaked nachos now, even though the ex-employee claimed that he would never have served those nachos to anyone (Pous).

To sum up, as much as smartphones and social media aids our lives, it also destroys them. People from anywhere can connect with anyone, despite the location on the other hand it can lead to isolation and people lose the ability to communicate with one another face to face.