Upside of technology in our social life
The progress of our technology makes it possible to communicate with a person on the other side of the world even in real live mode and with real time video. The technology develops very fast. 30 years ago you couldn't imagine that it was possible to have a conversation with someone on the other side of the world in real time video. Now we even take our laptops and our smartphones with us on vacation so we could be in touch with our friends and family that stayed at home. In the late 90's it was hip to use Messenger (short MSN) and write to each other in real time even when you are from another country or state. Now we see that MSN is replaced with Facebook/Messenger that has also the ability to chat and even share more with your friends than before. All these things where not possible without the invention of the computer and the internet ways back in the 50's. As we speak now, we send million mails a day without drawing attention to this evolving technology. And the techonologically evolution makes it all go faster and faster and better and better.
In case of emergency's like car accidents, a fast call from a mobile phone can make the difference between life or death for the person who suffers from the car accident.
Spreading news does go faster and can reach more people. 60 years ago, news from 1000 miles away would take more than a week to be known by you, certainly if it was by a physical mail. What happend far away took sometimes more than a half year to reach you. Mostly the news didn't reach further than the local town, so it didn't reach you at all if you lived miles away from the event. Now it happens all instantly, live and reachable for the whole world. All because of the Internet revolution.
Downside of technology in our social life
All this technology around us has also some downsides. Because our smartphone and the internet is always at our fingertips we are all overwhelmed with messages from friends and family. We check our mails and Facebook every 10 minutes because we would not miss a thing. But think by yourself, do you really miss anything important if you should shut off your smartphone? Do you? The answer is no! We don't! If we should shut of our smartphones once and a while you should see that only the important things will reach you without all the unnecessary messages you think you need to know about. Today we don't even know what's important anymore.
Humans can speak trough computers and phones but this technology still misses some things. The aspect of actually seeing each other face to face and feel the connection between persons. Even intonation falls away by communication trough text messages. Being with eachother makes us feel better phisically and mentally because being together was the way of communicating for more than thousands years. Now we changed the social aspects in less than 5 decades but I think that we, as a human being, can not adapt this fast. Or do we think we could adapt so fast? We still need physical contact, shake hands, show gestures, intonation, show handlings, smell, feel and much more when we communicate.
Be accessible anytime, anywhere is something nice but can also be very stressful. Our minds don't get any breaks anymore. We are all mentally overwhelmed. The smartphone and the internet is so addictive that their are organizations who organize weekend and even full weeks to distress from our technology. The challenge: survive a week without technology around you.
The future
With what we know today we can only guess what the future will bring us. What's certain is that technology changes exceptionally fast and that we need to keep up with it. The only message I can give you is to not lose real physical contact as technology evolve.
