Technology Addiction

There are 2 issues about technology I am interested in when talking about it. The first one is whether technology controls us or the other way round and the second one is if the internet alienating us from the ‘real’ world. 

Think of your cell phones, your blackberry, your IPhones and your video cameras , we use them to play games, take pictures, play games, go on internet, check email and have instant chat every day. Have you recognized that we never put our phones in a distance that we can’t touch? We put them in our pocket, jacket, handbag, on pillow, next to the laptop, right in front of us in the table or put Bluetooth on our ears. We can always reach our phones because we want to reply instantly to the email, messages or phone calls received! Also laptop and IPad, they allow us to surf internet on lap and in arm instead of a desk which make us easier and more consistent to use these devices. We log on Facebook at once when we use computers, we keep refreshing it even though there’s no new message. We go on Google to search what’s going on in Japan, what stupid things Bush has done or how many children Stanley Ho actually got.  

All these are technology addiction- game addiction, instant chat addiction, cell phone addiction, Googe adiction and facebook addiction. We might not obviously realize that technology is controlling us, but it does!  For instance, CCTV cameras give security to different places. Computer systems control traffic lights, flight schedules and train routes. Different equipments to measure climate, geography, population, medication, so on and so forth. In the disaster areas in Japan now, although there is no power supply, technology from nearby areas is vitally important to do the rescue. Some say God is controlling the world, but I say technology has taken over our lives! Put it this way, what would our life be like without technology?

For some people, they can’t even distinguish the ‘real’ world and the ‘virtual’ world as they are too devote themselves towards video games or online dating. The main reason is that people can achieve something that they think it is impossible to do in real world like vent their anger by killing people without imprisonment, able to rule a whole city or have a second life affair. In the second life, the world is virtual ,but the emotions are real. Somehow the world can be virtually real like when there are multiplayer playing the game, people learn how to socialize, build community and protect their community. They can even make virtual world engagement or wedding. People develop characters that represent themselves as an identity in the second life so that they can transfer their real world actions into the virtual world. For people who don’t play online games like me, might think the virtual world is meaningless. But there’s no denying that technology is able to alienate people from the real world by emotional connection. A number of studies have scientifically shown that when a person plays a video game over and over and becomes addicted to the pleasure got from the video game, a kind of chemical called Dopamine in the brain will increases during the times of pleasure and its increasing level is different according to different form of gaming. In other words, our brain will release an addictive chemical due to the excitement we get from playing video games.       

Last month I watched a movie called ‘Black heaven’.

It is a Belgium movie about an innocent boy ( who had a girlfriend) enamored with a mysterious girl who was treated as a lure in a video game world called ‘black hole’ by her crazy brother. Since the boy was fascinated by the things he saw in the video game world, there’s nothing more important than to go to ‘black hole’ every day to meet that mysterious girl. He awoke not until he almost got killed by her brother in the real world. We can see people already have an idea that that game addiction can be dangerous.