Below is my answer to the following question: Has technological determinism entrenched social communicative values or are we still in the driver's seat?
I was listening to the radio the other day when I heard a commercial for a computer repair company. The advertisement mentioned how much of an interruption a slow computer can have on a person's day. It then went on to say that, in similar words, people cannot live without computers. I laughed as I listened, thinking about the question posed above... and I hate to say it, but it's true. As much as people would hope that it's not, it is. We, as individuals, have become so reliant on technology that we wouldn't know what to do without it. We (I dare say at least a majority of people) are no longer in the driver's seat.
Now, I don't exactly want to admit the following, but I will to defend my argument. The last thing I do when I go to bed at night is check my phone, and the first thing I do when I get out of bed in the morning is check my phone. I usually wake up with a near 30 emails (I need to stop letting people suck me into signing up for e-mail subscriptions), and after deleting most of those, I check Instagram and Facebook to "get up-to-date" on the social media world, as if something drastic happens every night in the less than eight hours of sleep I usually get and I have to find out what it was. It's sad, really. No longer do I squint my eyes from the bedroom lights turning on first thing in the morning. I'm now squinting my eyes upon the brightness of my iPhone as I feast upon my social media.
A few months ago I was in Salt Lake City over the weekend for a family reunion. At the same time, I was serving as an intern for a local magazine. When I turned my phone on after having it off for less than one day while we were at a cabin and didn't have mobile service, I was greeted with almost 10 missed calls, 2 voicemails and several emails about a problem that had occurred with a published article in the magazine. And, you guessed it, the missed calls, voicemails and emails were not exactly good news. It was eye-opening to me how quickly my attitude changed after listening to the voicemails and reading the messages. It easily ruined my day for a few hours, until I realized I wasn't going to let it, and I turned my phone off for the remaining two days of our reunion.
Other than my wedding day, those two days were the best days of my life. Alright, maybe that's an exaggeration, but it felt like a whole new world not being attached to my phone. I could dedicate myself to my husband, his family and the events we attended.
But... it was only a matter of coming home and feeling a disconnect from the world that made me turn my phone back on. I thought: What if someone needed to get ahold of me?; What if the success of my internship relied on a call/email I wasn't answering?; What if SOMEONE DIED?! Granted, I had to turn on my phone in order for my life to start working properly again.
And it did. Until the computer stopped functioning at my work. At the time, I worked for Albertsons Sav-On Pharmacy. There are four computers within the 20-foot-long working area, and it would be impossible for me to accomplish my job if even one of those computers stopped working. After explaining to customers that one of our computers shut down, and we weren't able to help them until it started running again, I heard many comments, such as "We just don't know what to do without computers, do we?"; "What did we ever do without computers?", so on and so forth. And again, while I laughed, much like I did while listening to the radio commercial, it was true. We are letting technology drive our lives.
What can we do, if anything, to stop that, or is it even bad at all? Well, those questions can be answered in a million different ways. Before this class, I would've argued that it is bad. But now that I'm in this class, and I'm seeing the benefits of the technology around us, my argument no longer stands. Technology is a life-changer. We just have to make sure we use it to change our lives for better, not worse. We need to get back into that driver's seat.
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