Digital Life – How Technology Has Changed Us

Digital Life Every day pack be hit constantly by a bombardment of online media. It utilise to be that multitude would see billboards, TV commercials and magazine, barely with advancement of engine room spate remain wired into the internet 24/7. Smartphones ar a great example of a device that promotes constant connections. It enables throng to be committed to online media at totally times. The effects that this constant connection has had on wad in general are brio changing.We stool sure enough agree that the lives of everyone who has access to these connections result change everyplace time. The ancient change that is happening in everyones life is the way we communicate with individually other. Just 10 years ago cellphones were starting to blend much and more(prenominal) universal. They evolved from big briefcase sized machines to something that thunder mug easily fit in your pocket. Even then though, calling someone was the primary way of communication ove r distances. That has changed and is no longer the case.With advancements in Email, texting and social networking, they experience all moved to a more popular position than making calls. Whether people lease to relay small pieces of study or have a long conversation, texting and emails tend to be what they use. While this may not count desire a big deal to most people, one can argue that it is making the people that use this form of communication over calling or confront to grimace interaction become stumped at interacting with people and sometimes have trouble communicating face to face at all.An interesting issue attached to this is that as a sequel of real life communications not cosmos a primary skill, some people resort to purely online relationships. Particularly online gamers who ladder games like World of Warcraft or other Massive Multi-player Online games. These relationships range from innocent friendships to as far as marriages which take part online entirely, but sometimes works into something in the carnal area. There have actually been many cases of people who met playing games online, then inflexible to meet in real life and expose up push backting married.While the aim of online dating has been near for a small-arm with sites like eHarmony, these sites still primarily run on face to face interactions and people have an idea of the interests and likes of the people they attempt to form relationships with. In the worlds of online gaming, one can argue that even though it is formed by two people, it is to a great extent mostly anonymous. On eHarmony you greet what the other person looks like while in online games, you only get laid who the other person hopes to look like.The person someone falls for online can be the exact opposite of what the other person believed they were getting into. totally of this stems from the fact that some people who become to accustomed to the online world and online media caper out to have severe communication issues in the real world that causes them to turn to the people they interact with online. Increasing the rate of socially gawky people is not the only effect that the internet is having. Due to the gigantic daily usage of Social Networking websites people take part of everyday, a problem with narcissism is arising.The problem with this is that if people have problems with things like self image, they resort to these networks. Facebook promotes negative move of the caselity directly linked to profuse forms of narcissism, which was promoted by a study done by Christopher Carpenter. The study express that among other aspects that are promoted by online social networking, a sense of deserving respect and a leave behindingness to manipulate and take advantage of others is highly promoted. Pearse 1) It is on that pointof clear that there is various social problems that arise from online media, not serious social ineptitude. While the previous drawbacks of the connected world were looking at the social sense, something occurs in the person that hurts their sense of being wholly. Since people are constantly on their internet enabled devices, they lose a sense of the things approximately them. They impart nigh the beauty of disposition, among other things. Since humans by nature seek companionship, they make the life altering choice to remain connected at all times.In doing so one loses the lastledge of the beauty of being alone outside. Like Sherry Turkle said on a radio reference If you dont know how to be alone, youll only invariably know how to be lonely. If youre always foundering for the device, the cell, the Facebook, the sharing, you lose that. (Tippet 1) What she is filter outing to say is that because of our fear of loneliness, we remain connected to online media all the time thus losing our ability to embrace being alone and absorbing the wonders around you. Another huge change it has in our life is in the cogniti ve sense.When people need to know a second gear of information they used to go to the library or find it in the newspaper among other sources. Over time it got to the point where it was as simple as googling for it. Currently it has gotten to the point where people rely on a small number of sources for information. The biggest one being Wikipedia. org, which is a free online cyclopaedia that anyone can edit and is maintained by other people. While there used to be a process that makes you think and search for information through and through stacks of books and articles, today it is not as interactive as it was then.The result is a slump in many habits like perusing and similar queries of knowledge and the increase in bad habits like laziness and reliability in sloppy sources. An undeniably great change that happens to people with constant online media is in the way they think. This relates to the changes in how people hunt information as tumesce. Advertisement is probably the b iggest part of online media. It is what fuels it as of the online world is funded through advertisement. While there is undoubtedly good products still in outturn today, it is not uncommon to see bad or unreliable products become successful.The reason for this is that people are bombarded by online advertisements so much more often now that they assume a product is the best if it has a huge advertising campaign. The more a product advertises, the more people it reaches and sells to. Thanks to companies like Google and Facebook, it has become easy for any company to reach millions of consumers ready to give their money away. Most consumers have the idea that they need to buy things to make them happy or more complete. This is implanted in them by the massive amounts of online media they face everyday.One of the issues with this is that many consumers do not remonstrate to do research on products they buy. They simply buy them because they are popular or because they have been adver tised heavily. The same way that people have gotten lazy at hunting down information and learning, they have as well as become susceptible to having their ideas and thoughts molded by big business advertisements. The presence of engineering science and online media can definitely make some people forget they are human, but only to an extent.If we connect some of the negatives the online world has brought on as it developed, we can see that some human qualities are confounded as well, or at least weakened. Curiosity is one of the parts of humanity that is waned thanks to the internet. Due to information being readily on hand(predicate) at the click of a mouse, the human desire to learn has decrease in many people. While they still go to school and get degrees, most people no longer absorb information around them or that available to them in libraries, for example.People dont take in stories and knowledge and hold them dear simply because if they are ever needed, they can be in a flash looked up or downloaded. Another way that the internet can assist people forget they are human is by allowing them to become anyone they want to be. This is a by large the main reason people play video games. Online games allow people to become anyone they would ever want to be from a warrior to a hero. There is nothing to stop them from achieving what they want online omit time, and so very much time goes into achieving their online goals.People become so immersed into their online persona that they completely forget about their real life responsibilities among other things they ignore. non only do some people build marriages and friendships online, but in doing allow their online personas to become their main one. Their online lives become more important than their physical lives. It is undeniable that humans are now evolving alongside technology. The further that technology evolves, the easier it is for humans to stay wired into the internet. People can now be connecte d at all times so of course it exit have an effect on how humans evolve.I believe humans will instinctively always know that they are only human. However this will have an effect in that more people will turn to the internet and online media to direct their lives, since many people believe others will know how to do things better, and seek out that wisdom online, but we run into a big issue here. We can already see how online media is making people multitask badly and how it severely decreases tension amongst many. Nicholas Carr speaks of a subject called Neuroplasticity which talks about how our brain is constantly changing and evolving.Due to online media, it is being trained to take in information very, very quickly in a very interrupted, deflect way modest bits of it come at us all the time. (Carr 1) whence we are actually evolving in such a way that we are gradually losing focus. One can argue that over time, with the growth of online media, focus is the main skill that ma y be lost almost entirely. Nicholas Carr states in an Interview on PBS News Hour that the because the internet serves distractions at all times of the day, that our focus is the target of it. What were losing is the ability to pay boneheaded attention to one thing over a prolonged stop of time. (Carr 2) We are evolving away from deep thought, because information is so readily available, and it presents itself to us in in the form of hundreds of small distractions every day. With online media constantly distracting people with Facebook and Twitters, some researchers wondered what life would be like for a person that would be abruptly disconnected from this constant link to the web. A group of scientists decided to put this to the test on themselves.The scientists were all shocked at what happened on the third day of their experiment. Richtel, a journalist who followed the scientists on a vacation, verbalise that You start to feel more relaxed. Maybe you stay a little better. Mayb e you dont reach for your phone pinging in your pocket. (Digital 1) After just triad days of being disconnected, the sense of extreme urgency that was causing the scientists to sleep less and constantly check their phone had faded away to a certain degree. It was obvious there, that there is something positive in disconnecting even if you do it just for a small amount of time.In conclusion, online media will constantly try to take our attention off other things, and this tailor shows absolutely no sign of stopping. It has undeniable effects on peoples social lives as well as their minds and how they think. As was stated by people like Carr and Carpenter, it is not a good direction in which things are evolving. While these problems are constantly growing, very few things are being done to stop them and even fewer are successful. As long as this trend continues, the chance for people to turn it around and begin using their brains as they were used before gets lower with time.It is up to the people what powers they give to online media, but trends point to them gaining more steam. The choice to disconnect is completely in the work force of the user, but users will most likely stay online. Works Cited Pearse, Damien. Facebooks swarthiness Side Study Finds Link to Socially Aggressive Narcissism. The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 17 Mar. 2012. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. . Nicholas Carrs The Shallows. PBS. Ed. Jeffrey Brown.PBS, 27 Aug. 2010. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. . Tippet, Krista. On Being. Transcript. American Public Media, 7 Apr. 2011. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. . Digital Overload Your Brain On Gadgets. Npr. org. PBS, 24 Aug. 2010. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. .