When technology fails...

Our lives revolve around technology. Technology has been invented to make our lives easier. I guess this is true but it also makes life more complicated. When I started University it was the very early nineties; mobile phones were becoming more common, but they were bulky devices that did not work very well and were owned by the yuppie generation. Most people made phone calls from the public telephone box, sometimes using a phone card! Email addresses were not heard of and the Internet was certainly not www. I first used a computer to produce my third year project, I used a windows operating system running Word 2.0c, it was printed out on a dot matrix printer and saved using a floppy disk, 3.5 inches I think?

Now, things are very different. Using an app I can dictate a note into my phone, email it straight to my computer, save it to a word processor and print. I can press a button on my phone and it tells me what the latest share prices are and if I need to take an umbrella to work. I can set my computer to remind me of a friends birthday and I can FaceTime my brothers on my iPad from the other side of the world. I can access my bank account and pay my bills from the comfort of my sofa and answer work emails whilst lying in bed at 10.30pm.

But this is where the first technology problem comes. Technology is meant to be making my life easier but it is actually making life more complicated. Emails to my phone and computer easily blur the divisions between work and home; work life balance is disrupted. Before this technology things would just have to wait for the next day.

The other major problem comes from our dependence on technology. It has become so intregal to our lives that when it goes wrong it becomes a real frustration.

My phone network is down today apparently a major outage (200 engineers are on the case), my laptop at work keeps dropping the Internet and a website I help oversee is full of bugs. None of this is life threatening, just frustrating. What's interesting is that if I went back 15 years none of these frustrations would have existed. Come to think of it, I wouldn't have been able to share this blog with you either.

Even though these occasional frustrations happen, I wouldn't live without technology. It helps me keep in touch with those I care about, find out answers to questions as soon as I ask them and prevents me from having to rewrite documents because I made a speling mistake.

Comments

  1. Anonymous11 July 2012 at 19:25

    I agree, technology itself can be liberating and exciting making you see the world differently. But it can also be so frustrating when it goes wrong. Maybe we need to get more old fashioned and get off these devices, meet eachother, talk or pick up a pen? Or is that too radical and risky these days?

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