Thoughts on Technology Taking over the World

Sammi Hintze
Dr. Hawthorne
October 20, 2012
Core 1

Reflective Paper #2

“I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe” (47). Its crazy to think that to the characters in Feed think our life is so complex, when really we have more technology than we need. People survived life without cellphones, computers, and even electricity, and now our world is becoming ultra-dependent on these things. After reading the book Feed, various arguments can be made about whether today’s society will turn into the world Feed predicts, and be technology dependent. Is our world going to turn into the society that is depicted in Feed? Life is being controlled by technology, and hardly anybody can go a day without technology, and wanting to be a part of it with new technology products coming out like Project Glass. It is hard to not believe that our world is going to turn completely technology dependent, like the one in Feed.
In the past, you had to send a letter in the mail you travel to see them to communicate with someone; if you wanted to talk to someone, you would have to put the effort into it and take the time to write them and wait for a response back. Then with technology advancing, the telephone was made and you could call someone to talk to them instead of writing a letter and waiting for the person to respond. Technology kept advancing, and now in today’s society, we hardly talk on the phone; we text instead, which is quick, easy, and effortless. This is what technology has done to human beings as a whole. It has brought wonderful advancements, yet at the same time, technology has been a curse and changed the way we view each other. No one really communicates with each other now; only through texting do we talk. This is lowering our communication skills with people and making us more and more dependent on technology, and most people do not realize that.
It’s scary to wonder what is going to happen in the future. In Feed, the characters will be sitting right next to each other, and instead of talking to each other, they will talk to each other through the chat that goes through their Feed. This is deteriorating people’s communication and personal skills. I am scared that this is what our society is slowly becoming; we already have some of the characteristics and portray some of actions that the characters do in the book.
Our society is so dependent on technology that most people don’t even use libraries anymore. When people need to do research for their papers, the first line of thought is to search Google. If we don’t find what we want on Google, we try another online search engine. Our last resort is to look at a library for a book or use an encyclopedia. Having the Internet in the palm of our hands is causing more and more people to become lazy and not as smart and advanced as they could become. Now even to read books we are using technology. In today’s society, more people are reading books online rather than going to the library to rent them or even purchasing them. Is the future ahead of us going to be all-online? This is a scary thought that runs through my head all the time. I don’t want to be dependent on all technology. That is only going to hurt us, and we will never learn new things.
Technology has given us a great number of benefits, but there is a cost. By giving technology the opportunity to run the show, we've lost sight of how to perform these tasks on our own. When a computer system goes down, society is halted until that system is up and running again. Technology is here to stay, but it will only control us as much as we allow it. Currently, it seems we are content to allow it to run the show, and as a result, we've become very much dependent on technology to the point where, yes, we are controlled. We do have the power to live upon our own free manual and gadget-free will, but we choose not to.
Google has come out with a new product called Project Glass. This directly correlates to what the Feed is. Project Glass is a research and development program developed in the form of glasses that show a display in front of you. Project Glass displays information in a smartphone-like format. Project Glass is also like the hands-free life and could interact with the Internet with natural language, voice commands. Since technology has advanced so much, these Glasses would be like wearing a computer. People are not going to benefit at all from these glasses; it is only going to make people more dependent on technology and less dependent on their brains and learning.
To summarize, when all is said and done, technology rules the roost in today’s society. Technology has brought us wonderful innovations and helped us enormously, but as each year passes into another, more and more we, as human beings, rely on technology. Society today is controlled by technology to such an extent that we would find it virtually impossible to live without it.