Does technology get along with humanity?

Communication technology is the transfer of messages -information- among people and/or people through the use of technology.

This process is getting even more common by using social media, news websites, blogs, podcasts and other online applications, the amount of data is really a universe.

Surely, digital has the capacity of everlasting as a huge box containing human race’s memories; on the other hand, it has the capacity to counteract with what gives sense to human’s life, namely the time.

The principal result given is a change on what communication is based on. In a digital era, the virtual communication is getting stronger than physical and increasingly needed.

Life is no more a continuum line where time is unequivocally a perpetual leap forward. In fact, digital can give the means to handle time within some limits, by using the digitalization that straightly broadens the perception of time.

It’s proper to say that the most undeniable effect of the digitalization is to bring people to converse more with those who are physically far away than with those who are not.

The pace by which technology has increased and increases is astonishing. Traditional methods are always more unsuitable to be going to survive in a such fast world.

Technology changes people: its advancement has brought about society becoming what is today.

Since the beginning of the industrialization, the technology has taken the role to be an effective alter ego for people, used as a model to compare and to stratify society.

Due to the enlargement of the communications, economic, and transportation’s infrastructures, globalization has caused, as never before, a massive socialization among almost the entire people in the world.

Traveling has become easy for almost anyone and it will be easier as far as technology progresses; however, a person can feel lonely if able to use internet. Thus, can human relations functionally be healthy while being distanced and replaced with screens and virtual as much as those real?

Negative aspects

An heavy use of technology is proved to result in such as an alienation causing malaises, or even negative mental issues such as eyestrain, difficulty in focusing, insomnia and addiction.

Generally, there are a lot of studies that claim that technology causes the main stress when it doesn’t work. Anxiety is also a constant effect primarily because of the waiting for notifications, essentially in order to be able to take a decision they are indispensable; also they are fundamental to change rapidly the circumstances in which people are involved.

The numberless sources, from which get a feedback is more than ever disproportionate and its unreliability, creates the famous called “fake news” cases. Many studies indicate that continuous use of computers disturbs sleep in both young and adults.

Apart from that, chats, e-mails, video-calls, emojis and technological means have become a first class system to communicate. The aim might be to fill the lack of what is left, once human warmth is not within- a kind of surrogate- we may have lost ourselves to replace us in thousands way of expressing ourselves through digital innovation?

Moreover, the rise of depression, anxiety due to the addiction it causes are usually linked to an inappropriate devices’ use. They significantly increase among those spending the most time engaged in more than two social media.

An interesting emerging fear is the FOMO: the fear of missing out. The person feels as if he/she were missing something, for example an event, a meeting or simply an experience, producing an incommensurate uneasiness.

If before the traditional betrayal was not enough, today most of the divorces are caused by a digital betrayal’s discovery, at least one message is capable of ruining a marriage and the facility to be unfaithful has dramatically increased in the former years just to easier way in communicating.

Positive aspects

One of the most controversial technologic positive aspect is, without a doubt, the effect to make life easier; but running the risk on making ourselves less efficient and depending on devices to be fully self-sufficient.

Not by chance, it allows a major security system, through cameras and efficient computer systems, a more control of management of money. The huge increasing of delivery is what most affects the world today with around 4 billion parcel shipments delivered by Amazon in 2020, to use an example.

Digitalization entails a further more educational method, just counting up the rising number of digital e-campus or courses it’s enough to establish how much reliability we attribute to it.

Technological advancement is not only for everyday life’s problem- but it goes from how many steps we take in a day to the weather. It also confines in medicine innovation for the health, researches, innovation in space bases, production improvement and in other several domains.

Among them, the use of technology allows to automate tasks, set up, reminders, gather receipts, to have a greater possibility of choice, to track investments and compare prices.

Even if underrated, computers are the keys to have accurate statistics with very rare probability of mistake. Because of this, several jobs don’t need people anymore but only the machine work.

In relationships, it erases the distance, allowing people to communicate no matters how far they are. Although the communication could pay the price to be lacking of its complete structure as much as a conversation face-to-face can have.

Thanks to technology the access to information is quite possible for anyone getting connection; even if the reliability of the sources is often questionable and discussed.

Future generations

Future babies, some comedians claim, will need a phone bottles rather than baby bottles.

It describes how much disturbingly child are being associated with an increasingly using of the mobile phones.

The fact that technology needs to be regulated creates the assumptions for which the youngest should not use it deliberately without supervising.

Is just a myth? Not for the WHO ( World Health Organization), that in 2019 published strict guidelines about children’s time on screens ending with a law (Assembly Bill 272). It has permitted schools to reduce smartphone students’ usage.

According to OFcom surveys, UK young adults spend a lot of time using their devices.  The majority claimed to be online more than 40 hours per week, approximately 5 hours per day.

Conclusion

Only when history will have made its course, we should be able to truly say if digital innovation has brought more pros or cons.

In light of what is emerged, it is clear that its complexity is out of the question, though the distance to turn a positive aspect into a negative one is short and perhaps even shorter is upbringing a positive aspect to a superlative one as well as a negative aspect to a terrible one.

What matters is the reality even if it abounds of writers, critics, poets, journalist and philosophers who, like an omen, predicted the imperfection somehow tangible of the society and its intrinsic capitalism. However, the great intelligence of the people should be the one to really comprehend what people need seriously and to change in according to preserve the true components of the human being that robot or digital innovation would never be able to substitute.

Even if the arrogance levels in which technology is in our lives can draw another conclusion of great value from which is quite impossible run away, hence, it is that one that a wise author had  somehow predicted  in his short novel  ” THE MACHINE STOPS” in 1909, while formulating these simple but powerful words:

” When the machine stops working, society collapses” .

E.M. FORSTER

If you want to read more about how technology has changed us, click here