Technology has done wonders for our world. And don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate that we have access to almost any knowledge out there, but sometimes I worry about the bad effects it can have.
I often find myself glued to my phone, scrolling through social media, but I try to make a habit, to not do it with friends around. But let me tell you that hardly anyone else seems to make an effort. My friends and I will be sitting at lunch and I’ll look around and eight out of 10 them are looking down. And this is almost all the time.
We have become so attached to our phone, tablets, computers and iPods that we stop looking at the world around us. We miss things. We stop paying attention to our environment. People have been hit by vehicles because they were texting while walking. More people have died taking selfies than by shark attacks last year. But that’s not all.
We start to ignore our friends in real life, but on the screen we give them our full attention. I know plenty of people who have friends that they can’t talk to in person, only through text. Our whole world revolves around our phones and we can’t seem to live without them.
But is it really our fault? It could be, but it’s something that affects almost the whole of our generation. Everyone else is on their phone instead of talking, so it must be OK.
Our generation has the ability to be great but we write ourselves off as lazy. I think we can do better. And when I say that, I don’t mean stop using all of this amazing technology. I mean we need to be able to put the tablet away and enjoy life without the constant temptation to scroll through meaningless posts. We can put our access to knowledge to use and educate ourselves.
But we shouldn’t completely shut out everything that may seem “pointless” because it is a part of our generation’s culture and we just need to limit it. We take selfies and laugh at stupid memes, but that’s us and it’s how we are.
There are endless pros and cons to technology and the Internet but we just need to be careful that we don’t become slaves to our phones. When we finally learn a good balance between virtual and true reality we could be amazing. We have the world at our fingertips.
Emily Ritter-Riegling is a Grade 9 student at Prince Charles Secondary School. The Teen Take is a column co-ordinated by the Teen Action Committee.