Final Post

 Final Post: 

My Relationship With Technology

    The relationship with technology that I've had to understand for myself, in addition to the rest of my peers, is one that is unprecedented in human history. Never before did a generation grow up with technology this advanced, from a very young age. This is a generational problem that I think some older generations can try and understand, but experience is always the greatest teacher and so they can't know exactly how we feel. Technology in of itself is not evil, it is simply an extremely powerful tool that can become, and usually does become toxic with how the majority of our society uses it. It doesn't have to be this way though, and with a healthy balance we can use technology the correct way and it can benefit our lives greatly in the process. 

    When I do some honest reflection about myself and my relationship with technology, I have not always had the same relationship. Depending on my life's present circumstances, I find the amount of online media I consume to fluctuate greatly. For example, if I have a lot of assignments due for my classes, I'll be on the internet much more doing research. While I'm doing honest research, the temptation to just start checking my YouTube feed, or social media, or the news is just a click away and it is very easy to fall into that trap. During times of my life where it is more essential to use technology, even for productive purposes, I find myself getting sucked into a loop of wasting a significant amount of time too.  

    Like I mentioned before, I believe that the issue with managing technology use is primarily for my generation (Gen-Z), simply because we have had an incredibly high level of technology since a very young age and it has been engrained into our lifestyles forever. It is almost hard to remember a time before the iPhone. When I look at the lives of my friends, I notice almost the same patterns that I see in my own life. I see and hear from them telling me similar stories about how their amount of use fluctuates based on other life circumstances. It is also so hard to deal with something like phone addiction because the way in which these social media platforms are designed to be addictive. 

    To sum everything up, I feel like my personal relationship with technology is not bad, but can definitely be improved upon. There are certain weeks and sometimes months where my technology use level I think is pretty healthy, and it is primarily being used to stay productive on my goals and what I need to get done. On the flip side, I would be dishonest if I were to try and pretend that I do fall into technology addiction from time to time. The compulsive urge to just scroll through the same three social media apps, even though I just did like 4 minutes ago, for no reason is something that does happen to me at times, and it is something I want to get under control as something like that is just merely a waste of time and energy.