The Tech Effect

In the bloggingheads diavlog between William Deresiewicz and Mark Edmundson, the two Professors talk about the Academic-Industrial Complex. As part of their discussion of college students in current times, Professor Edmundson brings up a point about 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 affected by computers and the internet.

I am a Computer Science major here at Chapman University, so I know how computers can affect who you are as a person at college.  Every day I check my e-mail, Facebook account, log on to AOL Instant Messenger, watch TV shows on my computer, and perform other activities that require the use of a computer with internet access. 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 a time when she was a kid when she went to Disneyland. In Tomorrowland at Disneyland, there was the Tomorrow House. In the house there was this “magical” oven that could cook things in minutes. We now refer to those as Microwaves. If you think of things like that, you can see how far our society has come in so little time. Due to this dramatic change in technology at an accelerated rate, society has changed greatly in a small amount of time. As a result, college students are drastically different than many people from older generations, like their parents or their professors.

College students will, and already do, have to get jobs and live on their own in “the real world”. But due to the changes in personalities and lifestyles it may not be as smooth of a transition as expected. Students are used to using computers and the internet all the time. As a result, college students have made their lives revolve around computers and the internet.  So when they start at a job that isn’t as modern or technology centered, it could turn out disastrous. College students will be working for older people that may not have transitioned to the new era of computers as well as college students have, since college students were born in the computer era. If college students expected their jobs to work as seamlessly as their computers and the internet do, in some cases they might be very disappointed. Both employers and future employees will have to work on getting used to each other, if they live drastically different lifestyles.

An important part of the internet lifestyle is e-mail and instant messaging. 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 communicating a lot easier and a lot more convenient than it used to be. 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. However there are 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 then 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 the internet to communicate instead of talking in person is not the proper way to live. If a person only relied on the internet to communicate, they would definitely need some real help. If society continues like that, there may be problems in the future.

If people don’t take the use of technology to an extreme it makes things a lot easier than they used to be. Such an example is the iPhone. The iPhone is an iPod and and a internet enabled phone mixed in one. It lets someone multitask extremely well and allows them to communicate with anyone at anytime. With all the new technology available, people are able to communicate in ways they had never imagined before.

As time goes on, technology will continue to advance. With advances in technology, the people that use it will change socially also. One day college students will be like their parents, trying to figure out how to use the “new-fangled” pieces of machinery their kids will be using. College students should start thinking about how they are different because of computers, and remember it when they have kids.