Walking through Ball State University's campus, just about every single person I see is on their cell phone, texting or talking, or listening to their iPods.
There's always that one person in my all my classes, zoning out the professor as they stalk people on Facebook or as they browse through the Internet. On the weekends, students watch movies when they hang out with people, they play video games, they take hundreds of pictures on their digital cameras or they blast music from their speakers to fill the possible awkward silence that may happen at a party when the beer pong tournaments have finished.
People are becoming addicted to technology. An addiction is something that relieves distress or puts someone in a satisfying state and can lead to tolerance, physical dependence and uncontrollable cravings.
There is a tolerance in society with our technology where we feel we must have an upgrade. When our phones become too old-fashioned, we upgrade to a more advanced phone which now includes Internet or can include all our music. When we find our iPod nanos no longer can satisfy our music taste of the day, we buy a bigger iPod with more gigabytes.
When we become irritated that, for some reason, our eyes can't absorb anything off a small screen anymore, we upgrade to a larger television. This time, it's flat to take up less space so we can have more items in our household.
In the way that an alcoholic must increase their intake for alcohol as their satisfaction in having six drinks dwindles, people must increase their use of upgraded technology.
People are having uncontrollable cravings for technology. At the library, students are playing on Facebook. In classrooms with computers, people are playing on Facebook. Even when I went to a professor's office, he received a new notification on his Facebook. This craving for fast-communication technology is getting out of control.
Maybe the point of physical dependence isn't there yet with our technology toys, but globally, there is now a dependence on technology for transportation. Now we have the Dubai Metro system, which was built in 2009 and is still under construction, which takes our technology addiction to an extreme.
According to DubaiMetro.eu, there will be Wi-Fi access across its entire network, people will be able to use their mobile phones on all areas of the Metro and there will be surveillance cameras on both ends.
We can see how the addiction to technology has taken the world into a state of mania and filled the world with fear.
Before the year 2000, there was the Y2K scare. Most computer software was using two digits to represent the year that the world was in, instead of using the whole year. By the time the world reached 2000, the computer could have misinterpreted the last two zeros in 2000 as the last two zeros in 1900. This Y2K bug was not only in computer software, but also in banking, telecommunications and airlines. Companies turned off their computers and used their back-up computers. The new millennium came and went without problems and the world was at ease again.
Yet there was that panic that the world faced. Everything in our lives seems to be recorded through technology and, for once, the world stopped and thought about what would happen if we lost everything that mattered in our lives because our technology crashed.
Yes, the world is evolving and technology has now become essential in our lives. But if people could cut out some of this technology addiction and we could actually socialize with people in person without technology, our problems might be solved more quickly.
Technology may be moving us ahead, but it's making us become addicts. And a struggling addict, be it to drugs, alcohol or any self-destructive habit, will tell you there is nothing worse than losing complete control.
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