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Technology and mental health
Overuse of technology by human beings
Excessive use of technology
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In The Shallows, Carr discusses the thought of reducing our use of technology in order to improve the damage that the overuse of technology has done to our brains. In our everyday lives, most people use technology for productive reasonings and rely on it to get their everyday work completed, so would it really be feasible to unplug from technology or should we just be reducing our usage? In order to have a better understanding of whether or not it is feasible to alter our technology invested lives, research had to be completed to discover the different aspects of the subject/problem. Some of the information that may be helpful to better understand this issue is exploring the health benefits/risks as well as getting another view on what technology …show more content…
This was all discussed and analyzed throughout Adam Alter’s TedTalk, “Why Our Screens Make Us Less Happy”. The increase of screen time has increased so much because technology has grown and evolved so much that we implement it into our lives in every way possible because it seems to make our lives easier when really we are just becoming brainwashed. Research has been done that proves that we all spend more time on apps that make us not feel good, such as social media and games, and less time on apps that make us happy, like education or exercise. Alter claims that we get so sucked into our smartphones that we don’t take the time to enjoy the world around us due to FOMO (fear of missing out). Carr touches on this same belief and argues that technology in general is consuming our lives and causes us to not be able to think linearly and disrupts the way that we read, write, and comprehend all information. Alter believes that if we all put our phones on airplane mode over the weekend and take the time to ignore our smartphones and have conversations with the people around us then our lives will be much
While his best arguments come from cultural criticism. Written text led to the decline of oral reading and television obliterated the radio. Every technology comes with it’s trade-offs, it just comes down to moderation. There is little doubt that the internet is changing our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is how the internet can change our brain for the better. Computer games have the ability to improve cognitive tasks and increase visual attention. He doesn’t always address the good effects that the internet has had on the world. One of the better strategies Carr uses is switching his point of view from third to first person. He reflects on his personal life and how his life has changed in response to what he has learned. Carr shows how even he has his faults but, being aware of a problem is the first step to finding
In “Attached to Technology and Paying a Price” (part of the New York Times’ “Your Brain on Computers” series), journalist Matt Richtel details technology’s effects on an actual family and recounts their experiences. Although Drs. Restak and Samuel are both widely respected in their individual fields, Mr. Richtel’s journalistic career has been almost exclusively devoted to studying technology’s impact on our lives and attention, and his views are voiced loudly throughout his work, even though they are not explicitly stated. In the course of reading “Attention Deficit”, it can feel at times as if Dr. Restak had come to the conclusion that technology is damaging to our brains and our personal lives long before putting pen to paper, then proceeded to search for evidence to back up his viewpoint.
“With every new innovation, cultural prophets bickered over whether we were facing a technological apocalypse or a utopia” (Thompson 9). This quote states that with every significant break-through with technology, people contemplate whether it will have a positive or negative effect on mankind. Technology allows for external memory sources, connections to databases, and it allow easy communication between people. Thompson then directly counters Carr’s hypothesis and states that “[c]ertainly, if we are intellectually lazy or prone to cheating and shortcuts, or if we simply don’t pay much attention to how our tools affect the way we work, then yes - we become… over reliant” (Thompson 18). In his opinion, “[s]o yes, when we’re augmenting ourselves, we can be smarter… But our digital tools can also leave us smarter even when we’re not actively using them” (Thompson
The human brain is a complex and interesting organ that we still do not know everything about. In the essay “Attention Deficit: the Brain Syndrome of Our Era,” the author Richard Restak talks about how our brains have changed in the way we see and respond to everything around us because of technology. Our brains have had to adapt to the different changes and the speed at which technology has advanced. Yet many argue these changes have not been for the better while others say that these changes will only benefit us. The change in the way the brain functions that he discusses, I think, are for the better of a person because advancements in technology is the way of the future and all of these changes will be for the better in the future.
From communicating with one another to researching for an essay, these high-tech gadgets are constantly being used. Unfortunately this is slowly becoming a danger to the human mind and an individual's ability to carry out simple tasks. This can be shown through the examples in Carr’s novel. He states multiple times that technology is damaging the brain and is struggling to do the simple tasks it should be able to do. Through his multiple examples, it is clear that technology is hurting us because we can no longer contemplate, concentrate, remember certain details, and more. Although, we cannot avoid using technology, we should be mindful of how often we use
These two articles are similar in the sense that they agree that the internet and computational objects are reshaping our brain’s structure by changing our neural circuit. By using examples from their personal experiences to identify a trend in technology use, the authors illustrate that the more we bury ourselves in technology the more we are unable to understand material which leads to loss of concentration and the ability to think for ourselves. As an author, Carr finds the internet a beneficial tool, but it’s having a bad effect on his concentration span. Carr points this out by stating “Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy, now I get fidgety, lose the thread and begin looking for something else to do” (39). He is no
Using technology can have certain effects on the brain. Nicholas Carr’s magazine blog, “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewrites Brains,” tells us an experiment from a ULCA professor, Gary Small. Gary Small
In Nicholas Carr’s, The Shallows, he writes, “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.”(Shallows). That is what technology has done to all of us over the years. It has shaped the way we look at articles and the way we choose to read.
Although Though technology can be good, it can be worse than good, such as people always with their faces on their phones and headphones in their ears, people neglecting books and using more online text, and people wasting their lives watching TV.Children now know how to use a phone faster than they can
Social networks, like Facebook or You Tube can keep someone updated with world events and even local events. It has become part of everyday life in which people can’t live without. But what lies beneath is the evil of how addictive technology can be. The above chart demonstrates that almost 60% of students use electronics more than two hours a day. This shows us that technology can be addictive. Jonathan Mandell’s article Are gadgets, and the Internet, actually addictive, recalls a time in April 2007 when BlackBerry users could not send or receive emails for 11 hours because of a glitch in the system. Many people reported this as a natural disaster (Mandell, 2007). People are relying on technology so much, that it is becoming a major problem in our society when it becomes temporary unavailable. Being able to plan your whole day on your smart phone and lock your front door to your house at the same time contributes to society laziness and dependency on technology. On the chart picture below I surveyed fellow ECPI Students on the question does technology make us lazy and or smatter and this was the results. From this pie chart it’s clearly shown that more than half of the students at ECPI agree that technology is making people lazy. Also the ratio of yes to no is about 6:1, certainly showing that the wrong effects of technology are starting to show up in our society. Choices people make about using their
The past two decades have overwhelmed the human experience with technology, along with all its distractions. The direct relationship between the mind and the body’s ability to adjust from these distractions can be extremely difficult .Further research has shown that it has become an addiction for many. Technology has significantly improved our lives as a whole through experiences such as Global Positioning System (GPS), cell phones and social networking allowing us to communicate with different people around the world. These technologies make our daily lives easier and more efficient. However, this also discusses the effects of technology on various aspects of our everyday personal experiences both with each other and with the world around us. On the other hand technologies such as cell phones have become a problem in getting students to focus in class and distracting drivers and thus, resulting in vehicle accidents. Technology is beneficial, but can also become an inescapable distraction in our lives. It is important to view technology as having the ability to make our lives better or worse, yet also as having the ability to change our personal lives and behavioral patterns.
Technology is unavoidable in our modern lifestyle. You wake up, you use technology; you use technology while cooking, while eating, while driving. While you’re lying in bed before you fall asleep, you use technology, technology wakes you up in the morning. Is all the technology around you good for you, or is it harmful to your health? Was our society healthier or safer before all the advancements? So many questions and concerns about all of the technology we crave, but there are very few people who know the answers. Technology affects all parts of human life. It can create jobs, motivate people to get active, and assist people in learning, but this does not balance out that there are dangers that follow the use of technology.
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 yet realized 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. First and foremost, health problems due to the increase in technology usage is becoming a bigger issue than one might think.
Technology has make our life more productive in many different ways. One of the greatest invention is Apple’s products. It leads an evolution of tablet devices. IPad or IPhone can act as a textbook, laptop, navigation, camera, notebook, gaming devices and more. It combines all the other devices into one which allows to manage our time effectively. “This is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extension of our minds” said Sherry Turkle. They are becoming part of ourselves. Perhaps some people are saying technology causes laziness because we are relying more on a devices instead of doing stuff by our self, but technology are intended to make our lives easier. We are still doing the same thing but in a more effectively way. Human race are moving on, we cannot stay in an era where people are still using paper map to find out the way, sending letter through the post office. If there is a natural selection in Human Evolution, there is also can be a natural selection in human’s behaviors, inefficient behaviors are being eliminating.
Reports from students after the study suggest that giving up technology cold turkey not only makes life logistically difficult, but also changes our ability to connect with others.” (Parker-Pope, “An Ugly Toll of Technology: Inpatients”). Her point is that, for the young generation, it is quite impossible to give up from becoming addicted to technology.... ... middle of paper ...