Technology and Communication

Eddie Xu
Professor Carl Schlachte
ENGLISH 1010
October 5, 2012 How Does Technology Advancement Affect Our Generation? Over the last ten years, technology has advanced tremendously. As a result, people are able to communicate better and easier than before. Emails and social networks provide instant chat across the world in form of text without physical interaction. Video chats like Oovoo and Skype allow people to chat and see in person, advancing communication to a higher level. But at the same time, it brings negative effects to the society. In other word, technology advancement provided a negative impact in my generation and my understanding of life because communication through technology isolated people from each other and weakens their social and empathy skills.
Internet was invented in the 1960s by the United States government for military purposes, but it became a primary method for people to communicate with. According to Wikipedia, nearly one-third of the world’s population used the internet in 2011. This showed that a lot of people used the internet to communicate. But at the same time, excessive time communicating via Internet instead of face to face communication results absence of social and empathy skills, causing the neural pathway to grow weaker. While it connects many people across the world, it leads to many problems and issues.
One of the problems about online communication is miscommunication. Through the use of online communication, people started to have trouble interpreting what the communication mean through the form of writing. Since online communication does not have facial expressions, emotions, and gestures, it is hard to distinguish whether it just a normal conversation or intensive argument. This pointed out that with difficulty to interpreting the meaning of the communication, people in our generation have started to become like “robot”. They become a being that doesn’t understand emotion and facial expression like in the ones in the movie, “Terminator”.
Another problem that rises up is a reduction of social skill. Concerned parents and scientists think that the expose of advanced technology may affect the younger generations’ view in reading and communication. In an article, “Research shows that Internet is rewiring our brains”, Dr. Gary Small pointed out that young generations, exposed to technology, have reduce their social skills since their brains are addicted to technology. The neural circuitry becomes so “hard-wired” that the circuit in face-to-face interaction has become weaker. This means since young generations like ours are exposed to technology, their brain of social skills start to become weaker, and behave more like a robot’s mind. This can later affect us in the workforce. It makes our generation harder to have social interaction and ineffective in work. In the textbook, “Management: A Practical Introduction” by Angelo Kunicki, she pointed out that in order for businesses to flourish: cooperation are prefer more than competition. This implied that since cooperation equals to social skill, the businesses in the near future would fall since our generation can’t communicate well with social interaction.
Another problem about the online communication is instant messaging. Instant messaging or IM was a tool that often used to communicate online. IM is almost synchronized chat with two or more people in form of text. It became popular in the late 1990s and quickly became a primary way to communicate. There are many IM sites, but the most common ones are: MSN Messenger with over 180 million users worldwide, Yahoo with 82.1 million users, and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) had 62.1 million users. Texting messaging is also considered instant messaging. Research showed that increasing time spent on instant messaging correlated to decreasing ability to interact with associates on computers or mobile phones. This strongly affected on teenagers in our generation. In an article, “Teen Texting Soar; Will Social Skills suffer?”, many students in Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School prefer text than face-to-face interaction. One of them pointed out he used it to avoid trouble. This showed that with the instant messaging, people tend to avoid problems rather than confront it. This also results a reduction in social skills and affect the interaction in the future when they join the workforces.
Facebook was created in 2004 and became one of the primary sources for online communication. According to recent Facebook’s statistic report, there are over 1 billion active users. The minutes spent on Facebook has reached over than 10 billion minute, excluding the usage on mobile phone. According to the article, “10.5 billion minutes spent on Facebook daily, excluding mobile”, Mr. Emily Protalinski pointed out that minutes spent on Facebook has increased to 14% in January 2012. Each person spent at least more than 15 minutes in Facebook every day. This implied that since people use Facebook, their social interaction with people started to diminish. People became so addicted to Facebook and other social networks, to the point that they would stay home with their computers rather than going out to interact. This isolation leads to many bad effects such as obesity, social anxiety and fear, addiction, and low self-esteem. These bad effects can be burdens to the society to advances. Since people use Facebook to interact with their friend or people, the relationship ties become weaker. In the long run, the relationship formed online created false hope and setting. This can be related to both Mrs. Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” and Mr. White’s “Once More to the Lake” because in both essays, they pointed how that they need to wake up from their “dream”, as time progressed. Eventually, people need to wake up from the virtual relationship that they created in Facebook because the relationship is frail and eventually will break as time move forward.
As time progressed, technology advancement proved beneficial to our generation. But, it negatively affected our communication and social skills. It made the communication much easier, but it changed its value. The value of communication is to chat and understand each other with truth and hope. But with technology, it became nothing more than virtual conversation with lies and impossible dreams.