My Relationship with Technology

 

My Relationship with Technology

    How many times a day do you think you look at your phone, whether it's for a message notification or to search for something? According to Zippia, Americans check their phone an average of 96 times per day and spend about 5 and a half hours on their mobile device a day. The amount of cell phone users has doubled from 2016 to 2023 having about 6.92 billion users in the world. 

Aren't these stats crazy to think about? And this is just for cell phones, I didn't even get into laptops, PCs, television, and gaming devices. Technology is such a huge part of our everyday life, I mean I'm using a computer right now just to write this up. But what effect does it have on me, you, and our society? Should we be worried about how technology will affect our future?

Technology and myself

    Growing up, my family used a lot of technology, but to a healthy extent. We would watch tv, and play video games together, however, we would have our family time with board games or going out on walks. I've noticed though, the older I got the more technology has taken over my attention. I catch myself staying locked up in my room to play video games to sit on TikTok for hours. My mental health was at an all-time bottom as the effects of social media got to me. I would compare everything about myself, from my looks, friends, family, and life to all the girls I would see on my Instagram or Tiktok. So I would stay in my dorm and lock myself away from the world. My social life had plummeted and everyone was worried about me.  This is when I knew I had a very unhealthy relationship with technology. 

    I knew I needed to do something to fix it, so I decided to delete social media apps such as Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. And for a couple of months, I also deleted TikTok. I read a story titled, "I'm 14, and I quit social media", and I realized I wish I had done what this girl did so much sooner. This girl discuss how when she got social media at the age of 13 she learned how her mom had basically been sharing her entire life publicly on that app. She then goes on to explain why she decided against social media and how that decision has affected her. I feel like this article connects to the article "How Facebook users don't know how Facebook Works".  It shows how we truly don't know how social media platforms use our data and yet we still post so much of our life into them. 

    After deleting social media, I realized how free I felt from the judgment of the world. I felt like I could dress and do the things I wanted without wondering if I would get a lot of likes or compliments on an outfit. Today I only use Instagram and TikTok, and I try to limit my time on both apps. I probably get on Instagram once a day for like 10 minutes. While I am on TikTok for about 2-3 hours a day, which is still way too much. I'm still learning and trying my best to grow so hopefully soon my TikTok usage will decrease. My Social media presence is well put together. I post once every other month on Instagram and always keep it appropriate so if any future employers search for me I give a good first impression. While my TikTok is actually promoting my content creation as I am trying to grow as a Twitch streamer right now. I have my own personal website that I made so if I am ever googled that will be the first thing that pops up. It has my work experience, a bit about me, and some writing portfolios. So while technology has so many negative side effects, I feel sometimes we do overlook the positive. It is all about how we use technology and if we let it control us or we control it. We should always stay informed of our digital footprint and how our data can be used online. A great article about how our data is used in this article titled "I left the ad industry because our use of data tracking terrified me". It talks of how ads are specialized to our interests based on the data these ads get from our cell phones. From our locations to our conversations, our phones track more than we think and we just let them. 

Technology and My Family

With the knowledge, experiences, and lessons I have learned personally with technology. I make it a priority to teach my younger sister about it as well as my parents. My sisters are 9 and 4 years old and I have noticed how they use technology way more than I did when I was their age. From television to the Xbox and even their own personal tablets, they are engulfed in the technology world. Even my parents have become more and more reliant on technology as my mom works from home and my dad has started to become more interested in video games. While right now, their use of technology is pretty positive and helps them in many aspects, I can see where the negative will happen soon. We try to take time away from technology and all spend time together just like we did when I was little. However, as my sisters get older they will experience the negatives I went through as a young teenager. I plan to teach my family more and more about technology as learn myself and encourage them to learn how to maintain a healthy relationship with it as we should all learn this, especially with how quickly technology is growing.

The AI Takeover

 

The AI Takeover

AI has been on a constant rise for the past decade as it can do jobs that would take multiple individuals hours in just minutes. Frontline PBS shared a documentary on AI and I was able to learn so much about it. 

AI has opened up so many opportunities for our society, however, it has taken so many as well. As described in the documentary, our society is a scale of capital and labor, and AI aids the capital side of the scale. It will cause the rich to only be richer as AI will save them money from salary pay because of how it takes jobs from lower-income individuals. From factories to more, so many jobs are being lost to AI technology as we grow our advances in it. 

Not only is Ai taking away our jobs, but it's also taking away our privacy as well. Companies like Facebook and Google keep hold of our data and can analyze each of us individually with the power of AI. I learned about surveillance capitalism, which is when our private human experience can be sold and purchased as AI can keep track of all of it. Guessing what we will do or search by using our data on what we have done before. However, it isn't all bad as AI allows us to have to world at our fingertips. We have opportunities that weren't available a decade ago and we should use that to our advantage. 

It's terrifying to think that Facebook and Google can use our data to predict and gain so much knowledge about the millions of users. From women's menstrual cycles to important days in your life, they know it all. I also got to learn about their experiments, for example, they people the "I voted" badge on Facebook to encourage voting and also would change the feed of an individual to see how it would affect their emotions. It is insane to see how technology has such a hold on our society today. One of the biggest issues is how our data can be sold to anyone who is rich enough to buy it. This danger to our identity and online security is growing every day as we make technology and AI have more and more control in our everyday life. 

News Deserts

 

News Deserts

What is it?

Before the EOTO presentations, I have never heard of news deserts. My classmate Cailee shared her presentation on them and I learned so much from her. News deserts are areas in the country or other places around the world that don't have access to news coverage. While of course, they can have online service from radio stations and their phone, the overall news coverage is not there. Cailee shared a quote from the Center of Innovation that defined news deserts as, "a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level." 

Why is this a Problem?

I learned how news deserts have been around for a while now, as there are always parts of the country that don't have news coverage. A big issue is how these deserts are growing around the country. Meaning fewer and fewer people are receiving the information they need. A huge part of this issue is how newspapers are becoming less popular. This could be a big part of the growth of news deserts. Cailee had shared how if we continue at this rate the United States could lose around 1/3 of all of its newspapers by 2025. That fact really stood out to me as I always remember how popular newspapers were when I was younger as my parents and grandparents would always receive them and read them all the time. 

What can we do?

Cailee talked about a good amount of solutions to this problem. From adding back more newspapers to focusing on the funding of news stations. She mentioned how there are many possible solutions, however, with these solutions come challenges. One solution that really stuck out to me was turning to digital media. I feel this solution is the way our society is heading, however, there are so many issues with this solution. A lot of the areas that are victims of news deserts don't have high-speed internet. As well as the fact that these individuals in these areas would have to have electronic devices that can allow them to see news. This is becoming more and more popular with smartphones, older generations may not be up to date with this and suffer because of it.