My Relationship with Technology

My relationship with technology is flawed, but I feel most people would feel the same. I know that I am addicted to my phone, as most people my age and demographic are. But, I am not addicted to scrolling or simply being on my phone. I am addicted to just having it with me, my phone is similar to a safety blanket to me, and not having it around feels weird and unwanted. I am on my phone more than I would like to
admit, and I think that is because I have grown up around technology and do not remember a time when anything was any different. As early as kindergarten I remember utilizing iPads to help learn letters and shapes, and even getting my own personal iPod Touch as early as third grade. I am very exposed to the world online, and I think that is affected by my digital footprint. I have been online/utilizing media for as long as I can remember, and I think that has had nothing but a negative impact on my life. My digital footprint is a little confusing to understand because my given name is Price and there is a brand of boat named Rinker (my last name,) so whenever I search out my name all that comes up is pictures of boats. This is kind of ironic, but I actually hard a hard time finding myself online. I ended up stalking myself for about 20 minutes before I actually found a picture or profile pertaining to myself.

The video titled Mad World Remix of Moby Video (Are You Lost In The World Like Me) stuck out to me while we were viewing it in class. It portrayed humans as mindless zombies and showcased how far off the deep-end humans could go with their brainless obsession with technology. I thought that the video was not too far off from a depiction of humans today, always engrossed in technology with little care for what is happening around them. I can imagine that if the technology becomes that much more of a livelihood in our lives we could potentially need it to function in our everyday lives. One of the parts that stuck out to me was the section where the girl was portraying an entirely different side of herself online, as well as the part about experiencing FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out. That is one thing that social media has given a lot of

people is a heightened sense of FOMO, if you were to be in your dorm on a Friday night and all of your friends were out without you, I can imagine you would start to feel like you are missing out on something. I think that it can be hard to find a balance between the positives and negatives because on a positive note look at what all it has done for us, it has catapulted us into this era of living where we have self-driving cars and grocery stores that do not require any workers to be functional. But on the negative side, the mental health effect of social media and how that has caused so much harm in some families will forever leave technology with a little bit of a negative connotation in my books.

I watched a TED Talk in another class by a woman named Sherry Turkle titled Connected, but Alone and the talk was all about the digital dilemma. She brought up how most members of Generation Z were growing up learning how to communicate through a screen and were not learning how to communicate with others properly, and I feel like I have fallen into this category. Turkle uses the term "Digital Dilemma" to describe this time of astounding technological advances that we are in, but also brings up points about how this is not good for our society and humankind as a whole because we are beginning to forget just how important face-to-face human communication is to our well-being. She brings up a specific example about how an 18-year-old said to her "... someday, someday, but certainly not now, I would like to learn how to have a conversation." Can you imagine if someone in my generation feels this way how a teenager 20 years from now would know how to carry on a conversation? 

Based on the videos that we have watched and reacted to this semester, I think that AI or Artificial Intelligence will cause problems for us in the future. With how advances and vast the concept is currently, there is no telling how much more advanced it can even become. I can hardly fathom how advanced it is with software like ChatGPT and Quillbot. Other initiatives such as Privacy in Design which is a software that works to minimize data collection of personal data and give users more control over their information. This is piggybacking off of those positive effects of technology that were aforementioned
and can have huge positive impacts on society if they are used in the right circumstances by the right people.

Through the concepts and terms that we learned in class, we can see how technology is a positive tool for us but a negative vessel for receiving information. We as humans are so worried about how we are presenting ourselves on technology that we often times than not neglect the entire reason that the technology is there for us. We become so caught up in the latest trends that we forget the true power of technology, how much it has effected our lives.