Ariel Weinstein/ Contributing Writer
Every day, people walk through life not paying attention to the majority of what is going on around them. Everyone is focused on his or her smartphones, texting and looking at Instagram posts, browsing through Facebook and getting in some online shopping. When they have free time during the day, it’s all about procrastinating their to-do lists with Netflix and Hulu.
Hours upon hours are spent with their attention glued to some technological device but is this a healthy way to live though? Every hour spent on technology for leisure time is an hour that is lost to seeing friends, going to the gym, being social or enjoying the natural world we live in. Without even realizing what they’re doing, people isolate themselves into a world of virtual everything.
Watching Netflix and Hulu, you see the relationships other people form and how others deal with it, when you could be out there forming your own relationships and friendships.
Talking to someone over text, it’s difficult to tell what the emotion and meaning is behind some of what that person might be saying in his or her message. Words and comments can have such a different meaning when you can physically hear the comment being made. This enables you to have a more productive and higher quality conversation when you can hear them out face to face.
I believe, as I’m sure most of you do as well, that society as a whole has become more and more comfortable in talking to others over a text than they do over the phone or in person. If we stop texting so much and allow ourselves to meet up in person more often our levels of comfort in talking to others face to face will improve drastically.
Not only do they miss out on having fun with friends but they miss out on gaining social skills that can take them much further than an invite to a party or night out. When people put away their technology they are much more likely to meet new faces and make new friends. This calls for becoming more outgoing, leading to feeling more comfortable in talking to strangers in general.
When it comes to Instagram and Facebook, I think it’s safe to say that while lying in bed, people lose sleep at night to scroll through pictures, posts and tweets that are much less essential to life than is sleep. If you add up all the minutes per week you lay in bed before finally agreeing with your phone to go to sleep, it turns into hours, which will eventually start to take a toll on your body and health.
Then there is the toll technology takes on learning. Not every class you take is all fun and games, and there probably hasn’t been a class any student has taken since elementary school that has been all fun and games. So how do students deal with boredom in class? They resort to technology. Every ounce of attention they may have had towards the professor and the material being taught just went straight to their phones and laptops. This is a serious issue because instead of keeping up with the material and understanding the concepts while being taught, they must learn it on their own time, which is also spent being distracted by their technology.
The technological world is by far one of the most beneficial and impressive worlds humans have created. However, we need to be careful that we’re not making the technological world our whole world.
Photo courtesy of Flickr
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