I like to challenge my own love of technology to keep it all in perspective. The below is a piece I wrote for my own musing a few years ago which still holds water today.
We are obsessed with technology, but it is not an obsession of our own making. We are being railroaded into believing that we need more and more interaction with the online social internet by companies who’s goal is not to enhance your life but rather to enhance their bottom line.
Technology is brilliant. Simply put, technology leads the human race to always reach a higher and higher state of living. At what cost though.
I recently listened to someone speak about throwing a ball about with his friend and what a great time he had. The problem, the ball was virtual!
Both of them were wearing virtual reality headsets and lived in different states of America. Yes, he was able to interact with his friend in a way they couldn’t otherwise due to location but, what about the physical and emotional aspects of getting outdoors and throwing that ball in the real world. They are all lost.
Technology is now driving us rather than us driving the need for it. As consumers we are being physically tied to the feeding trough and being forced to take as much as the companies such as google, Facebook, snapchat, etc. will feed us. We have become the consumer version of faux gras!
Think of your daily life. If you are like most people you will be awoken by your phones alarm going off. Why on your phone? Because we have been led to believe it is more convenient to combine as many devices as possible so our mobile becomes our heart and our head!
Once out of bed we will head to get some breakfast. While eating we will digest the latest news on our screens.
Quickly get ready while playing back some tracks on Spotify. We linked our Facebook account to it so the media companies, as well as our friends will be able to see what someone our age is listening to. Then they can better spend their marketing money to ensure they appeal to the already converted rather than try to break a new artist with those who simply won’t care.
Run for the bus or train, Google will tell us when our trip should start as it already knows that you are five minutes behind time. But then you always are, so more signals are sent. Every time you browse a website today pictures of watches will be prominent or time keeping software will be pushed to you.
Our train journey will be to the sound of more music, this time downloaded as mobile signals will be too fickle to stream. Our telephone provider sees we are getting towards our data limit anyway so we’ll get ‘trials’ of extra data in the hope we will up our contract price.
We’ll read a book on our phone too. Amazon may as well be able to see if we are a fast or slow reader so they don’t over saturate us with new offers. No point contacting you when they know you always wait until half way through a book to look for a new one. You only manage six pages a day so they can direct their marketing elsewhere for the next month!