Final Post: Our Relationship with Technology

 

              Why do we use social media? Is it to connect with others? Is it to connect with ourselves? To make us feel like we belong? Or to make us stand out? Your answer could consist of one, two, all, or even none of these reasons. but we all have our reasons.

Personally, I do not use social media all that often. I just recently made an Instagram to stay up to date with friends both here in college and back home, but still find myself hardly using it at all. I guess for me I just never found social media as appealing as people made it out to be.

While I feel I have a pretty good relationship with social media, my relationship with technology is a completely different story. We all have those days where we rethink our lives after staring at a screen for twelve hours straight. When your eyes start to hurt and you wonder what you’re even doing on your phone anymore. I’m sure we all have those moments where we wished that technology didn’t even exist. However in this day and age we do not really have much of a choice but to stay surrounded by technology and different screens constantly. Even our public school systems have begun to switch over from using traditional pencil and paper to the latest new Chromebook or iPad.

Of course technology is a huge part of our lives – probably a much bigger part than it should be honestly – but at some point it stops even being a choice at all whether to look at a screen or not. At school writing papers or doing homework, on your phone to shoot someone a quick text, or even just in your car driving to work – in newer models anyway – there is a screen.

I think that technology has many benefits. We are able to calculate complex mathematical problems with the click of a button, look up any words definition, watch and create videos and pictures on a tiny screen that fits in your back pocket. The possibilities are endless. But with these great advantages comes many unintended side effects.

The internet can be a dangerous place. There are many scams and scammers trying to mislead you, steal your information, or even give you misinformation. The sad thing is that many of us do not even give these things a second thought anymore. It has been accepted as simply another annoying thing we are forced to deal with.

I am fortunate enough to find very little to no information on myself when I search my name online. My name of course is not the most uncommon name out there, so it is not too difficult for me to blend in with hundreds of other Rachels out there.

Of course there are many things we could all do to better protect ourselves and our privacy online, however, many of us simply will not take the steps needed to do just that and will end up with a less than ideal online footprint that may just end up coming back to bite them in the future.