Technology in the Real World

In modern society, technology controls everything we do in life. If we want to communicate with someone we simply shoot them a text or if we just want to say ‘happy birthday’ to someone, we can just post on their wall on Facebook and everyone was happy. Back in the “good old days” children never had an iPad to learn new things about their surroundings and if someone wanted to talk, they simply picked up the phone and called another person. Technology has overrun our society and while people say that this is making us smarter, it is only making us less reliable on anything other than a phone or laptop. Mae found this out first hand in Dave Eggars’ novel, The Circle. The ever-changing technology ran everything that the Circle did and it only changed every day.

With our own fast changing technology, Evgeny Morozov writes about a new way of recycling in “Is Smart Making Us Dumb?” BinCam takes pictures of the inside of your trash and you earn points that automatically connects to your Facebook page and whoever gains the most points, wins. This new technology makes you and your family’s recycling habits visible to others on their social media sites and is used as “peer pressure.” You can recycle and impress your friends but if you don’t, you’re only ruining our planet Earth more. In 2010, Google Chief Financial Officer, Patrick Pichette, stated in Singapore that the “world is broken” and that by making technology smarter, it will fix everything from minor traffic problems to larger, more complex problems. It is similar to a few similar things Mae went through at the beginning of her job at the Circle. When Brandon was helping Mae tune into her new technology, it was a lot more advanced than Mae had realized.

Okay. Now everything you had on your other phone and on your hard drive is accessible here on the tablet and your new phone, but it’s also backed up in the cloud and on our servers. Your music, photos, your messages, your data. It can never be lost. You lose this tablet or phone, it takes exactly six minutes to retrieve all your stuff and dump it on the next one.

All this new technology that Mae was experiencing was overwhelming much like our society today. All this new technology is starting to make us slower and more reliable on other things to take care of our problems for us just like at the Circle.

Everyone wants to achieve some sort of happiness and they think technology can do that for us. Just because we have the latest technology, doesn’t mean that we are all going to have the highest self-esteem or the best life. In 1995, Christopher Scheer wrote in his article, “The Pursuit to Techno-happiness” about the looks he saw on peoples face when they talked about technology and “the future” of it. Fast forward 21 years later and people still talk about technology and what the future has in store for it simply because with the resources we have now, there is no limit to what we could be seeing in the next 10 years. When Scheer was listening to a forty-somethings idea into the future 10 years from now, it was interesting.

Everything you ever wanted to do, you’ll be able to do. You want to be a jaguar in the jungle? They’ll put your brain on a chip, put it in the jaguar and boom! There will be no limits, man! None.

Now, even though that cannot happen today, it is quite possible in the near future. Technology has allowed social media sites to grow bigger since then. According to Jon Swartz from USA Today wrote an article, “Facebook’s Quest for World Domination to Be Displayed at F8” talks about Facebook and their desire to grow a lot bigger than they are becoming now. “Facebook’s global ambitions are as huge as its audience of 1.6 billion people: Digitally connect the service around the world, especially in poor countries.” And to achieve this, Facebook is using F8, a way to help connect with the community and launch platforms. Many apps are starting to fuse together in a way to help other apps excel. Analysts expect Facebook, especially Messenger to open up “chatbots” to interact powered by artificial intelligence. Analyst Brian Blau has said about the apps now, “we’re entering the post-app era,” Blau says, “Where multiple apps will be linked together in a seamless way, probably by intelligent bots, they will act in concert, so you don’t have to jump from app to app.” Technology has grown tremendously and even though we are not as advanced as The Circle, we are surely on our way there. The Circle wanted to close their employees into a new world and wanted to know everything they did. Society today is similar to that but we are only doing it to ourselves and partly it is the creators of the apps also. They want to keep up with technology and be one step ahead of competing apps, that we are forced into learning all this new updates in a small amount of time before we learn about the next update in another app.

Today, we are expected to have the best technology and most of the time, people today are obsessed with getting the most likes and comments on a picture of status that everyone’s self-esteem but our growing technology is no match for that to stop anytime soon. Just like The Circle, we have the best technology around and it is only growing more and more every day. We are glued to whatever device we have at the time and nobody has the time for face-to-face conversations anymore, it is all about what we saw on Facebook or who is fighting on Twitter now. Social networking sites like Facebook want to achieve this “world domination” and attract as many people as they can to their site. So what exactly could that mean for our future and our kids? Technology is changing constantly and who knows what the future could hold for us, our children, and even our grandchildren. The future is unknown but we know that there is no limit to what could happen next.