The Tech-Savvy Era
In today’s hectic life, it is hard to find some spare time to attend to daily chores. It’s no longer a man’s world where the male of the house goes out for work and woman stays at home and manages the household. But women too are matching footsteps with men and are doing pretty well themselves in the corporate world. For a nuclear family consisting of just two or three members including the mother, father and child/children where the parents devote their entire time and space to work, it leaves the child alone with no emotional stability and an entire day filled with loneliness. The child compensates this feeling of loneliness by digging into the virtual world.
It is a common spectacle to see children as young as eight carrying fancy cell phones in their hands and looking down into that six inches screen and smiling. That’s when you figure that the child is actually communicating with his/her friends through instant messaging applications like Whatsapp and BBM. Very often when I go for dinner outside, I see families where the child is busy staring at his smartphone and the parents are busy making important calls to their colleagues/bosses. The main point of going out for a family dinner is to actually communicate and have some nice and quiet family time. But technology has had such an effect on the human race that we fail to have a proper face to face talk.
In the olden days, the only way people could communicate with each other was through letters. Then with the invention of telephone, communication became simpler. And then came the internet and the era of smart phones which made it so easy to interact with people that the charm of real face to face conversation has been lost somewhere. The number of likes for our photo on Facebook has the ability to boost our self-esteem. Teenagers spend hours and hours online in search of some form of acceptance. There are many who even fail to see the sun because of the amount of time they spend online. Virtual conversations have made it so hard for people to chat when they meet. There are no topics that come in mind because all the talking is already done through instant messaging. Relationships hang in the balance of Whatsapp’s last seen.
Everything comes with a price, and so does technology. Our interactions with family have reduced to bare minimum, relationships with friends and spouses have become shallow and our children are brought up in a virtual environment where there is no limit for exposure. Studies have shown that spending too much time online leads to depression. If we look around, we find majority teenagers who live life through their smart phones. Some are so addicted to it, that they refuse to part with it even at midnight. Checking the phone every five minutes is something that majority teens do. We fail to realise that there is a world outside with fresh air and things to do. There are so many hobbies one can pursue. Researchers’ advice us to go for a ‘Digital Detox’ where in people can take a break from all their phones, laptops and tablets and just relax outdoors.
Technology has made us so lazy that we are unwilling to rise from our couch and go for shopping trips. Shopping sites like Flipkart, Jabong, Myntra, etc has definitely made life simpler but we are the ultimate losers and we no longer feel the real magic of going shopping. The education system too has now taken the help of technology. Tablets are introduced in schools and students are tested with the help of such online exams. The value of books and reading has somehow lost its importance with the progress of Internet. One cannot completely ignore and give up their gadgets but can definitely find some time to go out and enjoy the fresh air from time to time.
