The Social Consequences of Communication Technologies

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The Social Consequences of Communication Technologies

How many hours have you spent on American Online Instant Messenger when you should have been studying for prelims? Communications shapes our modern society as well as brings many burdens and negative aspects along with it. It does not seem like it is even able to help most of the population of a developing country because most of the people in that country do not have access to modern communications technologies. Current telecommunications technology has enlarged our social lives decreasing our productive time, increased the rate of spreading of negative ideals, and amplified our dependence while diminishing our independence.

Telecommunications seem to decrease our independence making the modern developed society increasingly dependent on inconsistently semi-accurate sources. The telephone and instant messenger service makes some dependent on others for doing their work. Furthermore, these services may make some users dependent on doing only a portion of the work while depending on others to do the rest for an individual assignment. This takes away from the learning process and decreases our individual knowledge. Group work is an essential and necessary skill; however, knowing how to work individually is also important and a balance between the two is crucial. Telecommunications shifts this balance more towards group work taking away from the necessary individual work skill. Further, the Internet has made people dependent on its vast knowledge. A vast amount of information is available on the Internet so in essence, all the information you could ever want is at your fingertips. However, the Internet contains a lot of irrelevant inform...

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...is goal has seemed to also take away from the amount of work done by a society. It would seem that with all this extra time the society would be researching and working to improve the technology further; however, the increased technology has seemed to make the society much lazier and increasingly dependent. The sharing of negative information and the availability of offensive material has also made negative ideals more available to those who may act upon them. These negative social consequences have seriously diminished the omnipotent potential of the modern communications technologies.

Sources Cited

http://128.121.116.191/aweb/pages/features/netporn/, Andrew Maisel, Parents, Kids, and Pornography on the Internet: A SuperKids Special Report

http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/Press_Release/press_detail.html, Stanford, THE INTERNET STUDY: More Detail

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