Is technology replacing humanity?
By Dinah Stephens
Apple just announced its first quarter net profit of $565 million. Clearly, the iPod craze is not just a popular fad. These increasingly smaller and more powerful devices are the wave of the future.
Cell phones, iPods, laptops, digital cameras: these have become part of our everyday lives. This innovative technology allows us to do things our grandparents never imagined, such as speak to our friends and family around the world, download and listen to any music, and access practically any information on the Internet.
However, there may be a downside to all these technical advancements. Surrounded by the conveniences of modern technology, we find ourselves consumed by multimedia and flashing lights. Have we simply forgotten how to interact with humans on a good old-fashioned face-to-face basis?
According to a recent survey, approximately 85 percent of college students own their own PC. While there is no denying that computers are valuable tools, it seems that we are living our lives based on this digital world.
Internet dating is rapidly becoming more popular. We are interacting in the most personal ways -- meeting each other, committing to each other, and breaking up with each other -- all over a machine. Match.com alone claims to initiate over 130 engagements and marriages each month. While online dating no doubt has advantages for busy singles, it's a strange concept that people can meet each other and get to know one another all over a computer screen.
Although most college students don't find themselves in the online dating scene, we do use our computers in comparable ways. We e-mail and instant message each other all the time, and many of us spend hours on sites like Facebook and MySpace. Are these ways of communicating taking the place of actual human interaction? Why meet our friends for lunch if we can just read their blog?
There are other ways we seem to disconnect from the real world. With the popularity of iPods, we have discovered another way to slip inside our own worlds and ignore the outside reality. I can't deny that the digital music player is a great invention, but it does seem to have put a certain distance between people as we walk around, earbuds blasting, oblivious to the other people around us.
Cell phones are perhaps the most common and useful, if not the most isolating technology. Just five years ago only a third of college students had cell phones; now more than 90 percent do.
But instead of walking from class to class and chatting with people along the way, we grab our phones. Any time we are bored we make a call to distract ourselves instead of making a connection with the people around us.
And all this talking in public may affect the way we treat people. While eight out of 10 people name their cell phone as their favorite tool of technology, six out of 10 see cell phones in public as a major irritation. As senior Traci Pohlson says, "Sometimes I feel like no one shows any civil manners to each other, since we all spend so much time absorbed in our own personal worlds."
Living in Silicon Valley, we are surrounded by incredible technology, and I would never suggest that we shouldn't take advantage of it. I admit I use my cell phone all the time and check my e-mail daily.
But there is value in the human connection which we can't get from a text message or voicemail. There is something to be said for not hiding behind the comfort of our computers and screen names and for presenting ourselves to the world as the person we are, not QTgirrl12745 or iluvSCU1986.
Dinah Stephens is a senior English major.