Sessions with Sydney is a weekly column by features editor Sydney Ray. For more installments of Sydney’s ideas, opinions and ramblings, check out the opinions page, and check back every Friday for a new issue.
Wake up. Tweet a message about mood. Drive to school. Take notes. Study for a test. Tweet about stress. Back to class. Post a link to Facebook. Get out of school. Receive a mass text message. Get coffee with a friend. Tweet about the conversation. Blast iPod in the car. Head home. Start homework. Tweet how great dinner was. Take a shower. Go to sleep.
This makes up an average day for many teenagers. Constant media updates are the daily norm. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, music and other mediums: that’s what life is all about, right?
Or is it?
While it may seem fun to be married to technology, I believe it is actually detrimental to many aspects of life.
Think back to 200 years ago, when a day went something like this: Wake up. Cook fresh eggs and bacon for breakfast. Plow the fields. Hike three miles back home. Labor away making lunch. Back to the fields. Plant some carrots. Collect fresh eggs from the chicken coop. Slaughter a cow. Make biscuits, gravy and beef stew for dinner. Mend a hole in a sock. Go to sleep.
Before we had advanced technology, life was all about getting the basic human needs met, like having clothes to wear and food to eat. Feeding oneself and surviving the cold were legitimate concerns.
Nowadays, our lives have spiraled out of control. Beginning with the industrial revolution and increasing exponentially until now, life has become overly complicated.
Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy updating my Twitter at least 10 times a day and surfing Facebook. However, I often find myself wondering “why do I care?”
That is, why do I care if the relationship status of some person I met once two years ago changes? Why do I care that so-and-so gave me some flowers in FarmVille on Facebook? And why do I care to know what everyone I know is doing every second of every day?
The simple answer is that I don’t care. And yet I spend hours every week on Facebook and Twitter, scrolling through updates, pictures and statuses.
Despite my compulsion, I have noticed several detractors to the need-to-know mentality we have all adopted.
First of all, what ever happened to our ability to focus? Personally, I have developed a case of ADD, which I partially attribute to the way I spend my time, such as interrupting my homework in order to shoot off text messages.
What ever happened to actual labor? People nowadays – myself included – are physically strained by P.E. classes. This is not to say that everyone is lazy, but the standard of fitness has definitely decreased over the last 200 years. Strenuous physical work used to be killing a cow. Now it’s jogging a lap.
Technology does have its benefits. I enjoy being able to keep in contact with people I otherwise would not be able to, like friends and family members who are away at college.
However, I fail to see how the benefits outweigh the flaws. The modern world is so concerned with how they appear through the multimedia that a person’s actual personality often falls through the cracks.
Speaking from personal experience, I have seriously regressed in my ability to focus on one thing and have learned that real physical labor will rarely – if ever – be required of me. Of course, not everyone will feel the same about the way our world is today and many people have had different, more positive experiences with technology, but we must be careful to recognize the problems that accompany technological obsessions.
Yet when I finish this column, I will probably tweet and check my Facebook. Although the online world has created quite a mess in our lives, I will continue to use these mediums. The internet and media are what is hot right now.
By developing my skills at an early age, I am saving myself a headache later when using such media will be necessary for networking and advertisement. Nonetheless, everything must be used in moderation, technology included.
Despite my concerns, The Feather is available on both Twitter and Facebook. For more information, please see the Dec. 4 article, The Feather adds new multimedia features.
