Technology in Our Society

The rapid development of technology has made the need for face to face communication nearly redundant. With the benefits of such advancements as texting, snapchat, instagram and other forms of social media the need for face to face conversation is an aging craft. The hidden backlash behind such crafts as texting is many people resort to typing what they are feeling to avoid any repercussions or true emotions behind their message. When communication with an individual you must deal with their emotions and inevitable response to what you may have just said.  That lack of deep conversation containing the expression of emotions inadvertently hinders our ability to communicate effectively. The problem with this generation unlike any other is we never did not have the availability of texting so for most of us this communication issue is almost natural as it is all we know. Only after a bit of observing do you really see the consequences that comes along with this powerful technology and the glaring fear some of us have with real human interaction.

        The convenience of this powerful technology of course comes along with an abundance of wonderful benefits which we all enjoy everyday. The instant communication with whomever you please to talk to is at your fingertips. Sharing information to an abundance of people is also in the palm of our hands, so to say technology has hindered our face to face communications is an undisputable but on the flip side it has broadened our opportunities to communicate, share photos as well as video with people all around the world as that was never possible before. The spread of news and events is also all done almost entirely through our phones. With  all these benefits of technology also comes along with the hidden repercussions.

In an article posted on The New Yorker by journalist Jonathan Nolan entitled, “Poker Face,” Jonathon digs into the lack of true emotion in such things as texting.. Jonathan does so by elaborating on the fact that we may send an emoji expressing a “digital emotion” while we stare at our phones with a blank face. Emojis have allowed us to portray emotions through text without actually having any real emotion behind the message. This further distances us from the necessity to have face to face conversation as we can not only communicate instantly over text but now can send along an emotion along with the message. As Nolan say in his article, “Someone says something uncouth, unreconstructed, obscene? People would never know from your reaction—unless you wanted them to.” This is something you can not do in person, we have emotions as we are human and when something is said we are inevitably going to have a reaction. Our rare need to express emotion is bumming us out, it seems as though our phones have made us robots. Dialing in an emotion to portray on our virtual face along with a message voiced to our recipient. Our phones and such things as emojis have given us the opportunity to live, without living in the real world.