Tortured by Hi-Tech: Article Analysis

Sally Morrell publishes an article entitled, “Tortured by hi-tech”, (Herald Sun 13’6’2001). She contends that human beings are being controlled by technology, and that instead of technology making our lives easier. It is doing the complete opposite and that technology now rules our lives. Sally’s overall approach and tone varies throughout the article, it consists of aggression and irony. Through the use of a visual together with examples and statistics Sally persuades the reader.
Sally gives her piece an identifiable context in her opening paragraph, she refers to her experience and of how she finally realised how much technology has taken over our lives. She then uses examples of important thing’s she couldn’t do without a computer, which makes the reader think of the stuff they couldn’t do if there computer had of broken down. Sally later on writes on how technology, specifically mobile phones, gives us the complete opposite to freedom.

Sally’s starts off aggressive in her view of technology and how it has taken over lives. She states that “we respond like lab rats to every beep, brrring and flashing message light”, this puts a picture in the readers mind that we are like slaves or animals to technology. “It was like someone clicked me off from the world”. This support her idea of how we have been taken over by technology as it shows she didn’t feel a part of the world when her computer broke down. These support Sally’s rhetorical question, “No wonder the World Wide Web is so named- webs are meant to trap prey aren’t they?” This question is answered in itself by saying that we have literally been trapped in the internet. Overall Sally gains the readers trust when she aggressively refers to how we have become slaves to technology, so when she refers to how she felt and what she couldn’t do with a computer. It makes the reader think how much that they have become slaves to and rely so much on technology.

Through the use of a visual together with relating the feel of a using technology to how a drug addict feels, these two things persuade the reader very heavily. The visual shows a human being connected to a computer via intravenous. This shows that the human is relying on the computer to live and without it, the human being would not be able to live. Which relates back to Sally’s main contention of how technology has taken over our lives. This then relates to when Sally states that using technology is kind of how a drug addict feels. Which persuades and impacts the reader’s thoughts a lot. This puts a negative thought towards technology for the reader because of the words “drug addict”, which is what Sally is trying to get everyone to agree on.

Finally Sally’s reference to what life would have been like 100 years ago relates to her contention in a positive way that technology definitely makes our lives a bit easier, although we have become slaves to it. Sally definitely changed the readers view on technology through her examples of past experiences. Also her uses of a visual and aligning her argument with a drug addict twigged the readers into how much we have become slaves to technology. She finally reiterates her contention in a negative way by saying that when technology doesn’t work it causes chaos and when it does work it just takes over your spare time.