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Technology is pretty darn great. It’s so efficient. It saves us time. It saves us money. Well, maybe not so much money — but we still love it. We roll around with it on the carpet like we might with a pet dog. We carry it around with us like a wallet. We sing along to it, go to bed with it beside us.

Technology defines us. We compare brands of cell phones, laptops, and the quantity of memory they possess. We cheer for our favorite brands and pretend to be experts when it comes to ones that we don’t like. And who knows, there might even be a few of us who would die for technology because when we don’t have it, we feel lost and alone. Having the capabilities to talk to at least three people at once, and then suddenly having no one at all — that would be terribly depressing!

Communicating with friends is good

But what happens to the world around us — the experiences we have in it, and the people we share them with — when we are relying on things like computers and cell phones so often? Do they supplement our appreciation for the world, or replace it? Do they add to effective and meaningful communication — or do they cheapen it? Having attempted to take these things into consideration, I have not yet followed the latest trend of buying an iPod and slinking around with it all over campus … and at the mall … and in class … while I’m talking to friends … you get my drift. I see this characteristic in my own life, and I see it in the life of some of my friends — we are addicted to computer screens and movie theatres, technology that lets us experience and see other worlds, lets us experience communication through satellite and screen, but promotes speaking face to face less and less.

What technology can do for you, and why that isn’t good enough

Technology can help us learn a good deal about another person — sometimes too much: you might happen to stumble upon a LiveJournal entry that contains unfavorable information about a friend, or worse yet, yourself; or you might find yourself being stalked by a sixty-year-old man in South Dakota who has a history of creepy behavior, shall we say. However, technology can help us meet people too, or feel like we are a small part of their lives from a distance. Viewing pictures of their life on online photo albums; reading their blogs; or chatting through Instant Messenger can teach us a lot about another person.

But these things can’t show us everything. They let us meet people and feel like we know them so well, but until we have met them face to face, we have not yet looked them in the eyes, or seen their smile, or the way their face attempts to conceal a lie or secret. It isn’t uncommon for us to meet people through a computer screen or, if we are feeling exceptionally personable, a telephone line. This isn’t always bad — a lot can be conveyed through the use of punctuation, capitalization, and those amazing little emoticons; or if we are on a phone, the inflection of our voices or the pauses between sentences. But a certain something might be lacking, something that has the potential to say more than words — a genuine human expression. Perhaps you have heard of people having a conversation with their eyes only. Or perhaps you wanted to shoot a “look of death” to someone over Instant Messenger. There are other instances where words just come up short. For instance, a hug from a friend or parent can say multitudes, and, depending on the situation, can often be better than struggling for something to say. Likewise, a handshake or pat on the back expresses something differently than words do, and sometimes one of them is more appropriate.

Living in a connected — or disconnected? — world

The reason that we have technology may have nothing to do with why we love it so much. Cell phones are sometimes purchased for emergency reasons, like when your car breaks down, leaving you stranded by the side of the road and you need to call for help. In the meantime, though, we personalize them with plastic faces, play games, and send text messages through them. It is sad that I can rarely sit across from someone and have a conversation with them for more than two minutes before they pick up their phone and send a text message to someone else, or before their phone rings and they have to step away to answer it and have an entire conversation. I’ll sit there and play with my food, waiting for my turn to be spoken to.

“The commonplace goals of human endeavor: material possessions, outward success and luxury, have always seemed despicable to me.”
— Albert Einstein

We buy computers for school, for work, for the sake of e-mail. Mine, with its high-speed Internet capabilities, has replaced the once-evil television and keeps me locked inside, staring at its screen that illuminates my living room. It might almost be pretty if I’d bother to tear my eyes away and try to notice. Better yet, maybe I could tear my eyes away, make my fingers stop typing, and go outside to read a book in the sun.

What I forget, what a lot of us have forgotten, is that there is a world a step out of the door, just outside the window. My cat sits on the windowsill in my living room for at least half of the day. Sometimes I think she sees and appreciates the world outside of my house more than I do. But I ignore it to sit occupied with myself and my plastic and metal machines that are supposedly the keys to efficiency, knowledge, communication, and that “prove” how in touch I am with culture.

I am rarely content enough to have a temperament that does not care about technology. I want to keep up with everyone else; I want to have the same things they do. I want the cell phone with every capability possible; I want a car that I can watch TV in; I want the iPod that holds even more songs, along with everything else I can think of by the time this article is published. But once in a while, I manage to step back and allow myself to wonder why I am so cranky and sleepy, and why it feels like I can’t get enough accomplished in a day. I have found, in addition to the responsibilities of everyday life, that it is usually because of the “things” I get myself wrapped up in. My computer has a virus. The battery on my cell phone died and I lost my charger. I have to scan eBay once a day to see if any certain DVDs or CDs have been posted for me to bid on. I want to buy my sister an iPod for graduation, so I have to scan the Internet for one of those, too.

Life without it

Unless I can find a rich husband who will buy me lots of expensive and frivolous things, I will be forced to find ways to amuse myself without a good many possessions and trinkets. This is such a shame, isn’t it? I will be banned to the outdoors on sunny spring days to look at dandelions and sit in the green grass, rather than sitting in my stuffy, dim living room watching movies; I will have no choice but to walk my dog on cool fall evenings for exercise rather than go to the expensive gym down the street; I will have to settle for a good book over a television because I just can’t afford to buy one; and I will have to talk to friends on the telephone or face to face in a café or park in order to communicate with them since I won’t have a computer to send bland, cold e-mails or instant messages through. Oh, life is so rough without technology. I don’t think I could hardly exist without several wires coming out of my back pocket, now that I think about it.

Yes, what humans rely on for contentment is shameful. It’s a terrible shame that we can’t tear our eyes off of ourselves and see what we have all around us on this lovely green earth that we take for granted; things that aren’t made of plastic and metal, that come in cardboard boxes, things that don’t let us down with technical difficulties more often than there are rainy days in a year. And it’s a terrible shame that we sit around stating what a shame it is as we multitask: writing essays and listening to our digital music and chatting with friends online, as sun streams through the windows and a warm and unfelt breeze blows outside.

Illustration by Anatole Upart.

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• Pithy Tales
• Accounts & Glimpses
• Verse
• On Writing