This month I would like to talk about technology and how it is changing our world. Tonight, I was over visiting a neighbour and helping her set up a new email account as her provider is going to discontinue service for email. For the twelve-year-old children in my world this would have been an easy and quick task. For two, dare I say, elderly women it was a bit of a trial. We did manage to get the job done but it took a couple of hours and I’m sure my grandson would have done it in about 20 minutes.
Personally, I enjoy technology and the opportunities it provides for communication with family and friends. When I was much younger, we wrote letters to people who lived far away and then waited, sometimes for weeks for a reply. We would often enclose newspaper clippings or photographs. Today we send an email with attachments that arrive at the recipient in a matter of moments most of the time. Because the delivery is so quick, we expect a response just as quickly. Technology has sped up our world and created expectations that are not always realistic.
Education used to involve textbooks, libraries, encyclopedias and card catalogues to look for the information we needed. Now we have search engines and virtual wicked pedias that aren’t always accurate. Care must be taken to ensure that the information gleaned from the internet is accurate and honest. Information including photographs can be manipulated, copied and pasted and sent across the globe in a flash. What appears to be accurate can in fact be totally incorrect.
The artwork attached to this blog is a piece called “Lost in The Game”. I did it in 2016 of my grandson enjoying a game tucked away in a chair in my living room. He was completely oblivious to the world going on around him. Today we all have our eyes glued to a tiny screen to catch the latest message from a friend, check our social media or look for information and directions. We are so focused on our screens that we forget to talk to each other. Recently, while visiting a friend, he texted me from upstairs that a package had arrived at the front door. No more doorbells or knocks on the door, just a text message and a photo taken by the delivery person to prove the parcel had been delivered. So many activities in our lives are guided by technology.
My fear is that we will lose the art of conversation. The life we are living is so tied to a screen that we miss the interactions we could be having with people who are closest to us. Take time each day to put the phone down and look around. Talk face to face looking each other in the eye, not through texted words on a device. Let’s put human interaction back into our lives.
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