Dialectics: Technology and Dependence

I can’t remember the last time I went to the library to check out books for a project. In middle school, when there was a course on researching techniques and checking the credibility of your source, the section on selecting books was useful. Now, the idea of combing through a long article without a find key seems tedious. For pleasure and studying literature, books are still the way to go. But selecting sources through the internet is a quicker, more reliable way of finding what you’re looking for… if you’re willing to sift through a few sites who claim that the Indian caste system was a result of Miley Cyrus’ (terrible) music.
I use the internet for the majority of my studies, and I’ve learned to sift through the junk that comes with the freedom to upload. However useful of a tool it may be, it comes with a cost: our time. Now that computers can get us information with a click, making researching faster than ever before, people want to find other things to do with their time. So computers are being made sleeker, quicker, and equipped to do more things on the internet to entice people to stay online. We’ve found ourselves communicating through our desktops (and phones and laptops) instead of face to face. When more stuff gets done, we find more to do. And mostly likely, we’re finding our entertainment on the internet.
Isn’t it ironic that we’re saving time, just to spend it with the object that gave us the extra minutes in the first place? That we’re dependent on the thing that frees us? Shouldn’t we spend the time we would have been researching without the internet with our families and enjoy the easiness technology brings?
We are also being trained to crave instant gratification. No longer are we tortured by that fact we can’t remember, there’s Google for that. Want to hear a song? Youtube it. We have become so reliant on the search engine that remembering information for ourselves is a nicety except in school and on game shows. And as internet is quickly being adapted to phones, we can take our computers anywhere. We are training ourselves to feel unprepared and incapable without a keyboard under our fingers and only our brains to rely on.
Of course, there are other ways we are dependent on technology. We use cars to get everywhere, and as a result the idea of walking a mile is met with a sigh worthy of a martyr. We use cell phones, and are always connected, so your workplace becomes portable on vacation, and you can use a tool of communication as an excuse to avoid conversations around you. It’s strange to think that we’re taking advantage of our time to further isolate ourselves in artificial interaction.
It’s interesting to think that we are becoming so attached to machines. If we could just step back for a moment and turn off the computer after our jobs are done, I think we’d find ourselves more relaxed because we would finally stop taking our breaks and working in the same place… the computer chair.