THE IMPACTS OF TECHNOLOGY

Everyday we cannot live without technology. We wake up in the morning, we take a bath, we have breakfast, we do our daily activities, all are affected by something called technology. From the simplest form of it until the most complex one, technology filled our daily life. The famous phrase "Information Technology" of course is one of the forms of technology.

In short, technology is something related to science and engineering, which is used by the human or other creatures in dealing with their environment, to make their life easier.

The technology develops fast. From the ancient age to the the modern age, there are billions of its products that have made our life easier. In prehistoric age, the ancient human created the tools made of stone. They also invented the wheel, which is very important to the next centuries. Imagine that there weren’t any invention of wheel. We must give a lot of energy to move our goods from one place to another. Many centuries later, there are a lot of important inventions for human’s life, such as the invention of telephone. Using it, we may communicate through long distances. And the latest technology which has given many changes to the world and is still being developed is the information technology.

The development of technology gives some impacts to human beings and the other creatures. Well, let me start from the positive one. Technology indeed makes our life easier. Without the inventions of technology, I think we would live our lives just like the prehistoric men did.

However, technology, just like the other things in this world, also has negative impacts. I’ll give you three examples. First, technology takes out the filters, like social filter, cultural filter, and religious filter. We can see in Internet technology. Internet is a medium in which no filter and censorship. Without parental guidance, your children may consume inappropriate materials from the Internet.

The second one is the decrease of your social skills. Too much usage of technology makes you more antisocial. In the past, children used to play traditional games with their friends outside the house. But now they prefer playing video games in their own room, all by themselves.

The easy access of technology also makes you too dependent on it. In the past, our people had more memorizing skills. They had to memorize things, because there were no tool to use to record things, except notebooks (the original phrase of notebook, not the portable computer). But nowadays, by using the computer, you can save any information you want in its memory to retrieve it in another day. In advance, by using the Internet connection, you may search any information you need through any search engine like Google, Yahoo, Altavista instantly.

Dealing with those negative impacts, what can we do? First, we must be aware of them. We must be aware that technology could also cause bad things. After that, we must give the people knowledge of those negative impacts and how to deal with them. The government also have to do some actions about this. They must give some regulations relating with the press and the media. It is just need to be done to protect our society, not to restrain the press. And then, to increase the social skills, we must create the real community, build the real network, makes friends in the real world, of course not in the cyber world. By doing that, it will take us back to our nature, as social creatures.