Is Technology Taking Over Our Lives? (Final Blog Post)

Final Blog Post 

Is technology taking over our lives? I think the answer is yes! While technology was invented to solve all of our problems, I think it is starting to create problems with how much it’s used. Technology has been growing exponentially so far this century. I haven’t known a world without smartphones or an office without a computer. My brothers and I will joke around with our parents from time to time asking them if a common technology existed when they were little kids. 

My personal relationship with technology ebbs and flows. My parents had a rule that my two older brothers and I could get our own phones once we reached the 6th grade. 6th grade was the start of middle school and my parents wanted to be able to communicate with us better. One of the benefits of being the youngest child is that they caved and I got my phone in 5th grade! So my phone obsession has been ongoing for almost 10 years! Sometimes I am full-on addicted to my phone and can’t put it down and other times I don’t want it in my sight. My problem is that I always feel like I’m missing out if I go a day without checking social media or group chats. One way I go about this is by going into the settings on my iPhone and creating app limits. This helps me stay aware and be intentional about my screen time. One cool feature is that you can see how much time you spend on your phone per week, and also compare that to the previous weeks. 

I think my generation as a whole has realized that we have a problem with social media. Within the past couple of days, Instagram has come out with a new app called Threads. Threads is supposed to be a platform that mimics Twitter, but you already are connected with all of your Instagram friends. Instagram tends to copy other social media platforms. We have seen them copy TikTok by creating their own Reels, they copied Snapchat by adding “stories”, and now they are copying Twitter by creating this thing called Threads. I think my generation is tired of new apps and we are seeing that there is more to life than phones. Covid-19 had a huge play in this because everybody had no choice but to spend time on their phones since there we had a lot of time on our hands. We are starting to romanticize the 80s (our parent’s childhoods) because they lived a life without this addiction.

Every adult will joke about how much time my generation spends on our phones. I don’t think this is a joke. There have been some serious issues regarding kids and their addictions to their phones. Psychologist Jean Twenge has done a lot of research on teenagers and social media. Some stats say that Gen Z teens are lonelier than previous generations and that the number of teens with clinical-level depression doubled between 2011 and 2019. Social media and technology has to play a role in all of this. Read more here.

All in all, I think we need to revert back to the early days of social media. Before cyberbullying became large, before kids’ mental health was getting impacted, and before this technology took over the world. There are definitely ways to be intentional about it, but it is so easy to find yourself mindlessly scrolling on these little devices. From here on out, I am going to set daily app limits and encourage those around me to get off our phones and live a little!