The impact of technology on today's lifestyle - Essay Example

Section/# Technology and Its Impacts An inarguable fact concerning the recent past is the fact that a great degree of technological change and paradigm shifts have defined the past few decades. The growth and development of the microchip from what it was merely 30 years ago and to what it has become today provides a clear obvious proof that technological change permeates nearly every aspect of the modern world in which we live. The goal of this paper will be to understand if the way in which people interact with technology is helpful or harmful.

Firstly, it does not take a great deal of analytical or scientific discovery to realize that the way in which technology has reshaped and classified our world is without question. Moreover, a sociological increase into the way in which technology has shifted interpersonal dynamics, relationships, and communication has been conducted by a variety of researchers and convincingly pointed to the fact that the current era of texting, instant messaging, Facebook et al has significantly decreased the amount of time that individuals spend in face-to-face communication and has moved society convincingly towards something of a more introverted nature.

Although introversion in and of itself is not necessarily a poor character trait, it must be noted that the overuse and reliance upon these technological tools which have already been discussed has created a dynamic by which formerly extroverted individuals are merely introverted and carrying out a great deal of interpersonal communication that one might otherwise carry out face-to-face via the Internet or other technologically enabled means. However, communication is not the only thing that suffers from an overdependence upon technology.

As will be discussed next, memory recall and the perennial knowledge that any and all information can be readily retrieved has created a situation in which memory and the ability to recall tidbits of information are placed at a much lower premium than they might have been in an era in which the likes of Google or other prominent technological means by which data can be retrieved had existed. As can be seen, there is something to be said for the amount of memory recall that individual can possess and leverage as a means of readily interjecting key understandings and tidbits of fact, data, and history into conversations and pertinent situations.

However, with an overdependence upon technology has, situation in which individuals have placed this premium of memory and recall far down on the list of priorities; choosing instead to merely “Google that” or “look that up”. Though these viewpoints are at least somewhat salient, it must be understood by the reader that they are incomplete with regards to explaining the issues and drawbacks that have been explained in great detail in the first portion of this analysis. Due to the fact that human nature is naturally addictive to many types of behavior, technology has provided yet another means by which this addictive nature can be evidenced within society.

To be fair, technology has been both a great benefit and an overall drawback with regards the way in which human behavior and development has taken place over the past several decades. As such, technology in and of itself is neither evil nor harmful; rather, human dependence upon it and overdependence/addiction to it, as has been defined within the preceding analysis, is what is most destructive with regards to this relationship.