The Negative Effects of Technology
Technology has affected the American society in a negative way, because it has lowered our quality of life, by being used as a distraction and creating problems with communication. Technology not only creates problems for young kids and teens, but also for adults.
There are many ways that technology can be used as a distraction but one of the most common is using your phone while driving. When you use your phone while driving you are not only putting your life in risk but you are putting the lives of the people around you in risk also. Five seconds is the minimum amount of time your attention is taken off the road while texting and driving. While this may not seem like much time, a lot can happen in five
…show more content…
When people are out with their family or friends, they are often too busy and distracted by their phone then to pay attention and interact with the people they are with. You will often see this with teenagers. Whether they are out to dinner or at someone 's house, most if not all of them will be on their phones. They are on their phones, either texting other people, playing games, surfing the web, or looking at social media sites. Social media sites also ruin communication because you don 't have as much face to face encounters, which causes you to lack social skills. By not seeing people face to face you lose the ability to read other people’s body language and social cues. Social media sites can also be related to feelings of loneliness and a decrease in happiness and …show more content…
It changes the way children think, the way children feel, and it puts their privacy and safety at risk. Children these days spend more time using technology and rely on it more than children used to. It is very rare to find a kid playing outside, then it is to find a kid inside watching tv, playing videos games, or playing on a tablet. “Teens manipulate a joystick instead of a baseball bat. The television has become a constant companion, replacing outside play” (Livestrong.com n.p.). “Our children’s digital lives are turning them into much different creatures from us – and not necessarily for the better” (Dalton Conley, Time Magazine n.p.).
If a child uses technology too often, then it may change the way that child thinks, and sometimes even the actual wiring of the child 's brain. If a child is using technology too much, they are not giving their brain enough opportunities to use their imagination or to read and really think and grasp the material. Out of the children between the ages of 12 and 17, 95 percent spend their time online. The playing of videos games can lead to distraction and memory loss. Children who use search engines may have a hard time remembering
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Fatality states that texting while driving causes nearly eleven teen deaths every day and 330,000 injuries per year. Almost 25 percent of all car accidents involve someone who was texting as they were driving; that is 1.3 million crashes. Texting while driving is the number one distraction for majority of drivers. Five seconds is the minimal amount of time a driver’s attention is taken from the road while using a cell phone. With that being said, if one is traveling at 55mph, five seconds is equal to driving the length of a football field without paying attention to the road.
There are numerous studies on the impact of advancing technology on adolescents, usually leading to the conclusion that social media networks often take part in creating the teen to isolate themselves from anything other than the internet. Social media however, does allow anyone to connect to the people living on the other side of the world. It is a way to keep in touch with old friends, and meet new people no matter where they live. Social media is often used to keep up with the latest news and often informs users of what is going on before the news channels catch it. It is obvious that social media has various positive uses. While these points are important, the fact that the younger generation spends most of their time with their heads down looking at a screen rather than engaged in conversation takes precedence. An article by Morgan Hampton states that,“children and teens spend 75% of their waking lives with their eyes fixed on a screen.” Social media connects people through a screen, but cannot excuse the fact that people are being disconnected from what is right in front of
People use technology for our daily lives and some of us over use technology. The dependency on technology is not good. Not only does this affect people,but kids as well. Technology has taken away the human interaction people and kids have with each other. According to the book No Impact Man by Colin Beavan, beavan states, “Knowing how to live is not something we have to teach children. Knowing how to live is something we have to be careful not to take away from them.”As kids grow older they are learning to live and only depend on technology.Before people would see kids running around outside interacting with one another. Today we have kids face timing or playing with each other through video
Using technology can change a child's brain. The use of technology can alter the actual wiring of the brain. More than a third of children under the age of two use mobile media. That number only increases as children age, with 95% of teens 12-17 spending time online. The time spent with technology doesn't just give kids newfangled ways of doing things, it changes the way their brains work. Technology can also be a significant thing. Technology has many benefits to the individual and to an organization including optimizing speed and time, providing a better way to store information, enhancing the sharing of information and providing automation to tasks that otherwise require extensive human work and calculation. Technology serves as an advancement in science that allows for a better solution to everyday tasks.
Many people have a wide range of opinions on whether technology is having a positive influence on our children or a negative, there is a vast amount of evidence to support both of these arguments. Technology can refer to so many things, but there are three main parts of technology that have the greatest effect on our children: video games, television/media, and computers. The modern technologies we have today are so powerful because they attract our genetic biases, that the human brain has a tremendous love for visually presented information. Video games, television, movies and computer programs are all very visually oriented and therefore they attract and keep the attention of children easily. By far the largest concern of technology today is video games.
This can affect them greatly because kids will think technology is a reliable source for comfort or entertainment. Being exposed to a lot of technology results in less critical thinking and more superficial thinking (Patel). This means that instead of thinking with their own brains, they rely on certain media to think for them. The effects show that their learning is being obstructed because they aren’t performing any important skills or thinking creatively themselves (Grigsby-Rocca). Children’s dependency, possibly leading to addiction is a scary thought to many. Signs of addiction include withdrawal, loss of interest, tolerance, deception, lack of control, and trouble dealing (Ghose). Children that show these signs are bound to be addicted and affected in a great way. Their personalities alter and their way of living will have to succumb to their addictions. A serious difficulty for parents and those around the child will be having to deal with their outbursts, irritability, and a change in their personality. Children become so consumed in what’s on the screen that they no longer feel the need to do things that they would normally do when they’re not looking at it. In most cases, a child will lose interest in hobbies or activities that they once enjoyed, and irritability will set in due to losing sleep to stay up on their device (Nagesh). These changes
Statistics have shown that an average of six-plus hours are exhausted on media in a single day by the average user. These users’ ages range anywhere from eight to eighteen. This staggeringly steep number is nearly how long kids spend at school everyday, and roughly matches the number of hours spent sleeping each night. Children are being introduced to a vast variety of technologies, like the television and internet, at a startlingly young age. It is crucial for the parent(s) of children to evaluate the adverse effects such exposure may have on their kids, such as a deprivation of sleep or socializing, decrease in mental maturation, or deficient academics. Some may refute that social and other forms of technological media assist the juvenescent crowd in retaining a regular and repetitive routine of communicating with others. Unfortunately, the youth abuses the privilege to obtain and use technology to the point where such neverending utilization serves as a threat...
Almost every child between the ages of eight and twelve are getting cell phones. The average home in America has as many televisions as they do people. Only 20% of American homes do not have a computer. Technology is quickly becoming a new way of life. The amount of time people are on their devices is growing rapidly. According to The Huffington Post, people are on their devices for on average about eleven hours and fifty-two minutes a day. That is almost half a day and a lot longer than most people sleep or work. People have not realized yet how they or their families are being affected by this constant use of technology. As a result of technology increasing, children are experiencing health problems, school issues, and social problems.
Technology has more negative effects on today’s society than positive. Due to technology in the past few decades Canine Shock Collars have been increasingly popular. Students in school pay more attention to texting than they do their classes. Violent addictive video games have made their way into American homes. Parents encourage their children to not text as much, but them to face the problem of constant communication. The Internet gives the students easier ways to cheat in school, and reinforces laziness. Internet Porn gives every bored male a chance to look at the seediest film in the comfort of his own home. Technology has taken the innocence and mystery away from the American family.
Electronics have taken a huge toll on childhood.Childhood in the past never included Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter, that now exposes kids to things they should not know until later in life. Most fear that young kids are learning and getting exposed to certain things way too fast.For example,Victoria Cobb writes, ”The innocents of childhood is being threatened by
There is no escape from technology. In most cases this is not a problem though. Many people respect and admire technology because it is there to benefit them. Without the technological advances we have had over the years, the world would not be what it is today. What people don’t understand is that technology can actually be a bad thing. In society today, people are looking for more and more ways to be entertained, and all it is doing is causing problems. People are doing less and less thinking and more and more watching, listening, and playing, all because of technology.
Technology is one of life’s most impressive and incredible phenomena’s. The main reason being the shockingly high degree to which our society uses technology in our everyday lives. It occupies every single realm, affecting people both positively and negatively. There are so many different forms of technology but the two most often used are cell phones, and the internet/computers in general. Today’s younger generation was raised alongside technological development. Kids now a days learn how to operate computers and cell phones at a very early age, whether it be through their own technological possessions, a friend’s, or their parents. They grow up knowing how easily accessible technology is, and the endless amount of ways in which it can be used. This paper will be largely focused on the effects of technology on the younger generation because your childhood is when these effects have the largest impact. I am very aware of the subject because I am the younger generation. Aside from major effects on study and communication skills, there also exist the media’s effects on teen’s self-esteem and mental health. Maybe more importantly, there is our world’s growing problem of over priced and unnecessary consumerism. Over time, our society has created a very unhealthy form of reliance and dependency on technology as a whole. People essentially live through their devices. Cell phones are always with people making it nearly impossible to not be able to reach someone at anytime, day or night. In 2011, there were 2.4 trillion text messages sent, and 28,641 cell phone towers were added across the US. 1 We use our phones and Internet for directions, communication, information, self-diagnosis, games, movies, music, schoolwork, work, photos, shoppi...
The internet is full of many things that could make us smarter. However, the internet is full of websites, games, even photos that could very likely have a negative effect on children and their behaviors. Also their education, speech could become affected and they could start doing badly in school or start cursing at a young age. Another thing is that their attitude towards life changes, instead of seeing it as their own giant happy playground they can view it as a very bitter and cold place and start looking, feeling, and talking negatively.
Technology – as defined by the US National Academy of Science (cited in Jones 1996, p.17) –
Society has been impacted both negatively and positively by technology. As a result, every aspect of our lives has been influenced by technology. Hence, life is easier, yet it has taken away some of the enjoyment. For example, remember the days of less stress and more personal interaction, when there were no online messages, no emails, social media or cell phones. We have become excessively dependent on technology. As a result, we need to rely less on technology even though it has made learning fun, and business, daily tasks, work, travel, shopping, making new friends and staying in touch easier. In conclusion, technology has a lot of benefits, yet it could take over our lives and become our worst enemy if we aren't careful.