A New Wave of Connecting

How many times do you check your phone an hour? How much time do you put into your social media pages? What about that game system that you can’t seem to stay off of? How often do you speak on the phone with a loved one instead of texting them?

Depending on how you answered those questions above, you can see how technology is at the forefront for how we all communicate and use our time. Sherry Turkle said it best when she did a presentation on how technology is leading us all down a path we don’t want to be on. She used several examples to back up the results from years of research that she had accumulated over the years. Technology is shaping us in a way to where we as human beings are starting to become out of touch with the real world.

We are able to redefine who are using social media. Sort of like a mirage. We paint these images of ourselves and our lives in hope that others will take the bait. We form these virtual relationships with one another thinking that we are forming life long friendships, when in reality, we know absolutely nothing about that person. They could be lying about who they are, where they are from and we would never know the truth.

• 

We live in a society where you can barely get a person to look up from their device. Whether it be a laptop, cell phone, or game system, people would rather engage themselves in virtual entertainment rather than spend actual time with friends and family. Now we ask ourselves why is this? According to Turkle, the people she has interviewed and studied have said just about the same thing, “they love the fact that they are in control.” So people feel like they aren’t in control when it comes to real time and real conversations. Instead of talking on the phone and immediately having to respond to someone, they rather text in order to take their time and think of their responses.

The problem with all of this is the fact that people are becoming more and more isolated. The more they take themselves away from the real world, they are cutting off their social skills. Especially the younger generation that’s being surrounded by nothing but technology. Unlike my generation who wasn’t brought up on cell phones and high tech devices, the new generation will not know how to survive when it comes to building actual bonds with people.

I’m not saying that technology is horrible and we should just cancel it all together, but as a human race, we cannot let it control us anymore. We must learn to balance it all and find our way back to our roots. We are letting what we see on social media tell us how to dress, how to act, and who to be. I think taking a step back from cyberspace would be healthy for all of us. Try to be content with being alone sometimes. And how about we decide who we want to be and who we are instead of depending on others online, who we barely even know, to make all of these choices for us.