The World of Technology in Our Lives

The World of Technology in Our Lives

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The World of Technology in Our Lives

Regular family meals used to be a way of having a proper conversation with your relatives but now they consist of being attached to their technological devices. More than third of kids spend family dinner times distracted by technology, 29% of social media users are on a social networking website while they are eating and people with the age range of 18 to 34 years olds are at a higher rate of using their smartphones during mealtimes. It is not a big surprise that modern technology has a big impact on everyone and the improvement society has made is incredible, but at the same time we can find negative repercussions. There are many sources that will help us understand these kind of negative consequences, such as The Impulse Society written by Paul Roberts and The Shallows whose author is Nicholas Carr. New technology evolves around immediate self-gratification due to economic strategies. As a consequence, it is difficult for people to achieve long-term goals and concentrate.

The marketplace and culture of today have made full priority in the mechanics of the self. Society as we know it is shaped by our own desires because economy benefits from our self-interests. In his book, Roberts mentions the strategy that the economy is using through technology: “The market would, inexorably and naturally, reorient its vast structures and processes around the self, because only the bottomless appetites of the self could contain all the output of a maturing industrial capitalist economy, which can never stop growing.” (7) They are using our inner worlds (such as identities, aspirations and hopes) because the marketplace is contingent on our transitory appetites. For example, you can find teenagers taking selfies to get likes and telling the cyber world every detail of what they’re doing because the socioeconomic system is shaping our expectations and giving us the idea that we need a status consumption. This is how first world countries increase their biggest profits nowadays, which now makes it impossible to separate the market from the self because they are turning into one.

Since economy has made technology and society fall into a program that is fully concentrating on the self, this is leading people to think about short-term purposes and instant satisfaction. Roberts explains how the limbic system (system of nerves that are concerned with instinct and mood) cannot see further from the present: “To the limbic system’s Doer, a credit purchase represents only the pleasure of immediate gratification. There will be pain when the bill arrives thirty days hence, and even more pain when unpaid balances accruing interest and penalties.” (70) This shows how our minds are not thinking about the future consequences and just “enjoy” the present moment because the limbic system is so commanding when it comes to demonstrate our desires that we end up making instant decisions, here is when we confuse want for need and we may regret in the future for making those choices. Now it’s even faster to get immediate rewards, for instance Netflix, where you can get the entire season of a tv show on a day and you can have a marathon, they don’t make

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