Digital world or Addictive world?
Today we are living in a world where almost everybody is connected and at every moment thanks to all mobile devices we have access to. And actually, there are today more gadgets in the world than there are people. New technologies have taken a central place in our everyday life to such an extent that they became a necessity. Naturally, technology has provided us many advances in sectors like medicine, agriculture, transport and has improved business, communication, education. But the most interesting part is the impact of technologies in the society itself. The way of living and the way of considering life have changed. And this is not due to the emergence of these technologies but to their importance gained these last few years. Thus in this post we will focus on how the importance of new technologies affects our lives negatively.
Instagram your life
The importance of social media today is manifested firstly by the ‘necessity’ of having a Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account for fear of being set aside by the society. This is specially the case of teenagers and young people that are seen differently by their peers by not doing what everybody is doing. But the impact of the importance of social media is much more significant.
It starts with a photo of your holidays or what you ate for lunch on Instagram, some tweets about current events and without even noticing it you are addicted to social media. You spend hours before sleeping to ‘stalk’ what others post online but mostly you need to assert your presence on these networks. And everything has to be perfect because what you are searching particularly is the approval of the community.
This pressure on social media users adverses the self-esteem and increases anxiety. And according to the #Status of Mind survey on 1,500 teens and young adults, Instagram is the winner causing damages on mental health and wellbeing. The problem of Instagram is that it creates the feeling that your life is not good enough, your body is not good enough and this because of all the photoshopped photos you compare yourself to. This short movie Me2 is representing the obsession of controlling your image on Instagram. The director explains how it can be destructive to try constantly to ‘hyperfiltrer’ our lives.
But when start the addiction? Is it a question of hours past on the smartphone or the importance given to what you see and what people can think about you? Probably, a little of both. As we have seen in the topic The Individual, 83% of millennials argue that they sleep with their smartphones, an alarming phenomenon that demonstrates the importance of social media in young people’s lives.
Living in another world
Contrarily to social media, today, everybody is aware that video games can be extremely addictive whether it is computer or console games and whether it is alone or online. And no one could not notice the importance they gained. In fact, “since 2008, sales of video games in the UK have outstripped sales of films and music”. It became the largest entertainment industry and a new hobby. But this hobby can be really dangerous both for mental and physical health. When you pass 14 hours on your computer, obviously it provokes fatigue, migraines, backaches, sleep disorder, eyestrain, eschar, obesity.. but in addition it isolates you from the society, increasing your anxiety and aggressivity. Violent video games can result in tragedies. And after the massacre of Colombine in 1999 researchers argue that violent video games can desensitize people and minimize criminal acts.
But why are they so addictive? What the gamers are looking for? “Gaming was a place where I could be anyone, do anything — save worlds, win wars, score a goal in the World Cup final; in short, be a hero, instead of a lonely and unpopular teenager” said Tom Meltzer, an ex video games addict. Escaping reality, that is what people like about video games. And one wonders what will be the damages with the emergence of Virtual Reality? In fact, with this new type of devices, it seems easier to really escape reality and so the consequences all the more important. What would you choose between customize every single detail of a new life, a new world that you can make perfect for you and your actual life? It seems easy to see the addictiveness of this kind of product.
What cannot do your phone?
“No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone”.
Yes, your smartphone can do almost everything today. Telling you what is the weather like in Madrid, turning on the lights at home, and even saying how many steps you did during the day. There is an application for everything but using your phone for every situation became a reflex and it makes us lazy. It is particularly the case of the digital natives, because as we have seen in the session about The Individual, they are born with technologies and don’t know how to live without. The smartphone and all its applications are made to simplify the life but it creates a feeling of dependance. Even if you know the way to go to your friend’s house you use google maps ‘to be sure’. Even for a simple addition you use the calculator. Smartphones are such important in our everyday life that they make us lazy thinkers. You don’t need to remember meetings, birthdays or way to go to a place because your phone is doing it for you but making your phone an external memory has consequences on your brain.“Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel prize and neuropsychiatrist at Columbia University argued that smartphones could compromise our long-term memory storage and ability to retain information over the long term.” People are also more often tempted to google an information when they are facing an issue than trying to remember or resolving the problem themselves. Nathaniel Barr and his co-worker have studied the phenomenon and agued that “If we become overly reliant on external sources of information rather than learning anything ourselves or thinking critically, it might be damaging”.
Technology is a vicious circle because it is the fact that technologies are important in our lives that make engineers developing new things in this digital world.
Digital Society and I
As an Erasmus student, I could choose the courses I wanted to discover during my year abroad. I wanted during this year learn more about communication, digital marketing and social media as I want to do a master in international communication next year. I felt like this course ‘Digital Society’ will be perfect to have an approach of the digital world. And I was not wrong because during the first session I saw that we will talk about how technologies are used in our society by companies, people or engineers and the effects, dangers and responsibilities that this entails.
During this course I have faced some challenges but the biggest for me was the system of work group established for some activities. It was hard for me because of the language barrier. I was scared about participate and speak in these groups but throughout the sessions I got more confident and felt more confortable speaking about my ideas. Another challenge also due to the language barrier was the way of writhing a blog post. Even for an native it can be hard to write with a blog post style but for me it was even harder because as English is not my mother language some sentences I imagined having impact in the post could finally not having that power just because it was not well said but it has enabled me to improve my English writing style and to actually learn how to write a blog post. It was also stressful for me knowing that everybody could read what I wrote on the Medium platform but finally I have found really interesting using a website in a course about the digital society and plus it has allowed to share and learn.
I think that we always learn about experience in life whether they are positive or negative.This course got me both personally than educationally. Firstly, I have learned to balance things because I am a person with a really strong opinion on topics and I usually see things as black and white. And during the sessions I realized that technology can be remarkable as much as devastating. Professionally, it reinforced my project to learn communication next year as I found really interesting the way social media can be used today to spread corporate culture. I have found very useful to learn also the limits and the responsibilities we have using Internet and I think that it will be beneficial in my future job.
Now I really want to lean more about e-communication and digital marketing. I want to go into detail and have a more practical view on the subject. Learn more about how to communicate on social media, which words use, what kind of strategies implement companies. I know that I still have to work on how to communicate in English and that is why I want to continue to study langages and be able to deliver an international message in a company.
