Is Technology Good or Bad?

I can not recall a time in my life that I did not have access to some type of technology in my household. I remember being asked in kindergarten to count the number of TVs in my house and we had three. One in the living room, that was Dad’s TV, one set up in the kitchen for mom so she could watch while she made dinner, and one for me in the playroom. I thought it was the best day ever the day I got my TV. No more begging dad to switch the channel from football or crying to mom to turn of the evening news I could watch Disney channel whenever I wanted and I did. But even earlier than that I remember being attached to the desktop computer in my dad’s office playing an educational game and calling for my mom for help when I got stuck on a question. One morning while my mom was trying to cook breakfast she came rushing in after my persistent calling and helped me for a few minutes until smoke started coming in the room. The bacon had burnt to a crisp and our kitchen was full of black smoke thanks to my early computer addiction.

Later on in intermediate school computer games were evolving to be completely online and it was a whole new world. When I got home from school it was straight to Disney channel .com to play all of the games based on the shows I had already spent hours watching. My 3rd grade year a new fad happened, WebKinz. I spent an ungodly amount of my allowance money on these overpriced stuffed animals because attached to them was a secret code that brought them to life online at webkinz.com as your own digital pet to feed, play with, dress, design their house, and chat with other friends who also had WebKinz. At the height of my obsession I had 18 different WebKinz linked to my account.

Around 4th or 5th grade the new way to communicate and play online with friends was no longer WebKinz but Club Penguin. Club Penguin was basically a large animated chatroom for children where you could design your penguin avatar and have them interact with the world they built around them. I would spend hours on the phone with my friends while we roamed Club Penguin together. Club Penguin and WebKinz both were heavily censored which made them ideal for kids, but when I entered middle school they suddenly became very uncool.

Middle school was a new age full of cell phones and unregulated messaging. I got my first cell phone in middle school for my birthday. It was a light pink and covered in flowers with a full keyboard to text with and one of the first phones with a selfie camera. I would spend hours texting my friends about absolutely nothing just to get to use my new cell phone and would plot ways to use my phone with out getting caught in class.

When high school hit technology took another leap, social media and smart phones were quickly coming to the forefront. When I was a sophomore I got my very first iPhone 4 (the most up to date at the time) and my world changed. I immediately downloaded every social media app my friends were using and wasted no time making use of our unlimited data plan. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram were all finally mine and I could finally see what all of my friends were talking about and be a part of the conversation.

Today technology continues to race forward with social media and ways of connecting people continuing to be at the forefront with Snapchat, Pinterest, and VSCO all new apps and ways of including others on what is happening in your life. Our generation gets a lot of hate about us being so involved and connected with our cell phones and social media saying we don’t know how to have face to face interactions anymore and its dangerous. While I have to disagree that social media is single handedly ruining my life I will say that the hate is not completely unwarranted. I think the most dangerous aspect about technology today is most definitely social media and the fact that you can check it every few seconds. But what makes it so dangerous is the way people treat it. People today are increasingly more often putting their worth into these apps. Social media is giving people a specific and quantifiable number to compare themselves with others. No longer is it just I think that girl is prettier than me you can now go count how many more likes or followers she has. As much as I love social media I think you have to be mature and secure enough in who you are and know where your worth lies in order to use it effectively without it becoming something damaging or harmful.