Are Americans Addicted to Technology? 359
jomammy writes "According to a recent Wired article, the majority of Americans are becoming increasingly dependant on their gadgets. High speed internet seems to be the one most determined to be a 'necessity'. A third of the country is said to pay more than $200.00 a month for their addiction, where 4 out of 10 pay between $100.00 and $150.00 a month. Other items in this list of 'gadgets' include, mp3 players, dvd players, laptops, handhelds, etc." How addicted are we? How addicted are you?
Spec-Tech-ular. (Score:5, Insightful)
And Japan is what? In the dark ages?
Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
Addicted? Or Dependant? (Score:5, Insightful)
If this is the case, am I addicted to food?
Re:Pfft (Score:2, Insightful)
I read a lot of books. Guess that's a technology since it requires a printing press. Guess I'm an addict.
Clinical addiction or Gorwing soft. (Score:5, Insightful)
If we are talking a general "growing too soft/dependent upon specific tech" then I would say yes, especially with the internet. I know far too many people who feel the need to have a machine up all the time.
But I think we should really go more basic than that; Electricity.
The standards that we are used to in America, and the rest of the industrialized world (stable, widely available power that rarely if ever goes down) is a) uncommon in the rest of the world, and b) an anomoly in human existence. Few of my peers know how to make a fire or even what to do when the power goes down (hint, the electric can opener will no longer work).
The level of panic surrounding the Y2k bug should have made this clear to anyone. Far too many people (some of them policymakers) panicked at the thought of "global power outages" and, as Katrina showed, far too many were left stranded, unprepared, and unaided when a real disaster struck.
In my opinion "addiction" to mp3 players is just icing on the cake.
in general)I know too many others who *have no clue*
Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe sometimes technology improves your life so you use it.
Addiction is when something makes your life worse, but you keep using it because you are irrationally drawn to it.
Re:Pfft (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Spec-Tech-ular. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
All of this to say that you cannot classify our like of technology as an "addiction." Are we selling our first-born children in order to satisfy our lust for new gadgets? Hardly. Is this fixation with technology making it difficult for us to live our lives? No. (In fact the technology sometimes makes our lives easier--hence it is a (partially) pragmatic desire.)
I find the hyperbole of "we are addicted to X" annoying (where X, these days, is often "video games" or "the internet" or whatever). I don't go into convulsions when I don't read slashdot for a day. I am employable and happy. I certainly wouldn't be stealing TVs and selling them on the black market in order to satisfy my insane lust for slashdot...
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a more compelling question would be: Is all this technology making us more productive? Or does it simply facilitate our slacking off with more diversions?
What a strange way to think of life. Is life all about being "productive"? I'd have thought the gadgets are supposed to make our lives better, however you wish to define better. Making it more productive makes it sound as if the only purpose to being alive is work and produce a product. Is that really what you think it's all about?
Re:drive 5 miles to use a pay phone???? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are purposefully implying, with this question, that it is a good thing (to prevent your child from using technology). Would I do something daring for the sake of my child? You bet. Do I think that removing them from technology represents a case where the child is better off? No.
Your one data point notwithstanding, I believe that a person is more likely to be happy, healthy, and intelligent if they have access to the full depth and breadth of what the world has to offer (including such things as: travelling to other countries, modern healtcare, books of all types, the internet, learning different languages, etc.).
Restricting a child's access to tools is silly. Smart kids will be smart no matter what. Giving them access to more of the world will make them more worldly.
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, how I wish I could take you back in a time machine to the late 60's, then the 1920's. On our first stop in the 60's, I'd take you around various companies and show you the massive number of keypunchers, programmers, analysts, and other Managment Information Systems people who keep their companies working. I'd then take you to a company too small for a mainframe and let you witness the poor fellows struggle with mountains of paperwork.
On our next stop, we'd drop by the 1920's. No automation here. You can literally find hundreds of typists per company, all lined up in rows. Secretaries abound, filing documents left and right. Personal assistents follow company executives around, keeping track of every minor detail. In short, lots of manpower for a return that we can realize today with a few PCs and other electronic gadgets.
I haven't even gotten into manufacturing, and how technology has changed the world there.
In short, technology has made us more productive. It doesn't always seem like it with all the technological distractions we now have, but you have to understand that the efficiency of modern technology is what gives us time and energy for those distractions. The greatest challenge today is to find better ways of optimizing business and personal matters. All the low-hanging fruit has already been realized, so we're on to the difficult part of squeezing out efficiency a few percent at a time.
"Dependent upon the government" (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of Katrina the very government agencies that we have formed, funded and trained to care for the sick, the elderly, the disposessed of our society, were placed in the hands of self-centered morons whose only interest was in settling the "shirtsleeves up or down" issue. People who could not leave because they were too sick and didn't own cars were being told to "take some cash and drive away". Even now no reliable plan exists to get them home and Karl Rove is directing the reconstruction efforts.
We form governments to protect us as a whole, because individual humans, however many guns they have, are weak and likely to die. To suggest that people who looked to the government that they supported to help them were "weak" or overly dependent" is in my opinion incorrect. Rather wwe should say that the government failed the people. The government failed in its most essential function. What's worse it did so because people let it fail, perhaps even made it fail not because it should not have succeeded.
How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:drive 5 miles to use a pay phone???? (Score:1, Insightful)
Lots of jobs out there hardly rely on computers to actually DO the job. While at some point a computer is used in designing or laying out a plan, it's hardly "every single job that pays more than minimum wage". I'd wager most of those construction workers make more than a lot of programmers, and they deserve their pay. Construction is a long and hard job especially being in extreme weather conditions, not to mention dangerous with all the "we know better than you" drivers out there driving off into construction sites because they can't keep their eyes on the road.
Side story. I heard a tale about a road crew who was tearing up approaches of people's driveways to prepare them for a new concrete approach as they came down with the sidewalk. One of the apartment complex owners complained that they should asphalt most of her parking lot because the "new" stuff they were putting in was inconveniencing her making them use the secondary exit. So they tore up more of her parking lot to appease her, and she wanted more work done after that (for free of course). The foreman said no, she complained to his superiors they said the ball was in his court. He still said no, and that she would have to wait for them to come back to finish what they started due to extra work she demanded they do. And because of the stink she made, she had about a foot deep hole in one of her parking lot entrances. It was well blocked, coned, barreled, so anyone driving a reasonable speed and LOOKING would see it and know to avoid bypassing the barrier. Every single morning the crew came into work, they had to call a tow truck to get a car out of the hole because people had been using her apartments parking lot as a short cut around a light...and they'd come flying around the corner leave about 10 feet of tread marks trying to get stopped before the front or sometimes the entire car went down in the hole. And I'd say it happened enough that a few of them made more than minimum wage and their job required computer interaction, but it still didn't stop them from driving into a deep, well-marked hole daily. And if anyone would have been in the hole, they'd be hurt if not dead. If I were the government, I'd take their license for at least 5 years involving accidents in construction zones, 15 years if they hurt anyone doing it, and forever if they kill someone due to negligence (rubber-necking, driving too close to the barriers *semis can chuck a barrel a good 20 at head height if it hits one*)
No: Americans are addicted to communications (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pfft (Score:3, Insightful)
Three words: Puritan Work Ethic.
Even if you're born in California, and your parents are New Age weirdos, the phrases "a little work never killed anyone" and "no one ever drowned in their own sweat" have been part of (European) America since 1620.
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
But when you consider how much time people waste with technology, you should also consider that executives could and did waste the same amount of time via their manpower driven alternatives, requesting pointless information, endless re-edits of documents (requiring the secretarial pool to retype the same document, with minor changes, over and over,) and maintaining expensive entourages that required far more time to manage than you can spend instant messaging your friends. And I do mean required--you don't have to instant message your friends, but you did have to manage your staff.
My wife worked at a law firm. The old lawyers, not comfortable with technology, used their computers to play solitaire, while dictating into tape recorders and getting secretaries to type the letter, over and over and over again as they read it and noticed mistakes. The younger lawyers typed their letters directly into their computer, edited it there, and got exactly what they wanted directly. The old guard took three days to produce the letter, the young ones took half an hour. The difference in efficiency, and sheer cost, is staggering. Of course, the old boys just passed these costs on to their clients...
Re:Spec-Tech-ular. (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Pfft (Score:3, Insightful)
But yes, after we got over that productivity is definitely nice. Of course, if you're obsessed with it....
Re:Pfft (Score:4, Insightful)
Do flourescent lightbulbs make for better sandwiches?
Re:addiction (Score:3, Insightful)
me? addicted?!?!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:addiction (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't test my love
Accept my love
Don't test my love
Because maybe
I don't love you
All that much
-Dan Bern
KFG
a terrible article (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people freely admit to being high-tech junkies.
"The internet connection is my lifeline," said Jennifer Strother, a mother of two young children who lives in Smithfield, Virginia. "It's the connection to friends, e-mail -- especially for stay-at-home moms. I'm hungry for adult conversation and any news that isn't Dora the Explorer or Blue's Clues."
How is this an admission to being a hi tech junkie? The very reason for her use of the internet is not tech, but communication. As with most of the article the authors attempt to classify us as "junkies" fails. He or she fails to see that for the most part, tech purchases are so that we may consume media such as TV or Music or communicate with others. This is not an hi tech additiction as the author would have us believe, because the technology itself is not the motivator for purchase.
Re:Spec-Tech-ular. (Score:4, Insightful)