The Tech Effect (Rough Draft)

In the bloggingheads diavlog between William Deresiewicz and Mark Edmundson, they talk about the Acedemic-Industrial Complex. As part of their discussion of college students in current times, Professor Edmundson brings up the point of the way computers influence the type of students that are at colleges.  He says that due to the fact that college students are all on computers these days, we tend to be more intelligent, quick witted, restless, and impatient.  As a college student, I strongly agree with his point. College students’ lives are greatly effected by computers and the internet.

I am a Computer Science major here at Chapman University, so I know more than most students how computers can affect who you are as a person at college.  Every day I check my e-mail, check my Facebook, log on to AOL Instant Messenger, watch TV shows on my computer, and many more activities that require the use of a computer with internet access. But it hasn’t always been this way. When I talk to my parents, they can tell me when they were my age what it was like. I remember my mother once told me about one time when she was a kid she went to Disney Land. In the Tomorrow Land area of Disney Land there was Tomorrow House. In the house they had this “magical” oven that could cook things in minutes. We now refer to those as Microwaves. An example like that shows how far we have come in so little time. Due to this dramatic change in technology at an accelerated rate, we college students are drastically different than many people older than us, like our parents or our professors.

After college, we students will have to get jobs and live on our own in “the real world”. But due to the change in our personalities and life styles it may not be as smooth a transition as expected. As students who are used to doing many things on computers and the internet, we have made our lives revolve around it.  So when we start at a job that isn’t as modern or technology centered, it could turn out disastrous. We will be working for older people that may not have transitioned to the new era of computers as well as we have, since we were born in the era. If we expected our jobs to work as seamlessly as our computers and the internet do, in some cases we would be very disappointed. Both employers and future employees will have to work on getting used to each other, when we live drastically different lifestyles.

An important part of the internet lifestyle is e-mail and instant messaging. As I said earlier, I check my e-mail and instant messenger every day. Especially now that I am away from my high school friends, I like to keep in touch. The easiest way to keep in touch is by e-mail/Facebook or instant messaging. I can have active conversations with my friends that are hundreds of miles away just by logging on to my computer. It makes things a lot easier and a lot more convenient than it used to be. But I don’t just use it for communication with my friends back home, I also use it to communicate with friends here on campus. The main reason I use the internet for communication is the fact that it costs less than making a phone call. But there a consequences to this form of communication. If a person were to get too reliant on the internet for communication, they might be inclined to use it more often than is needed. They would get so lazy that they would go to their computer to interact with their friends through that medium instead of actual social interaction. Using a digital medium before a live social one the majority of the time is not the proper way to live. If a person got to such an extreme that they only relied on the internet to communicate, they would probably need some help. If our society continues the way it is, we might have to deal with such problems in the future.

If we don’t take the use of technology to an extreme it makes things a lot easier than they used to be. A great example is the iPhone. The iPhone, is a touch sensitive mobile internet, music, and video device that makes phone calls. It is an iPod and and a internet enable phone mixed in one. It lets someone multitask like crazy and let them be able to communicate with anyone at anytime. With all the new technology we have, we are able to communicate in ways we had never imagined before.

As time goes on technology will advance more and more. With this advance in technology, the people that use it will change also. So one day we will be like our parents, trying to figure out how to use the new-fangled pieces of machinery our kids will be using. So we should start thinking about how our lives are different because of computers and remember it when we are older and have kids.