When cool people carry and use their favorite smartphones, either alone or together, on the street, at the dining table, at recitation, in the bathroom, or anywhere else, when talking about social problems such as the increasing loss of social interaction, hedonism, individualism, and others that are considered counter and anti-social, people always argue that it is motivated by many negative factors. One of the biggest factors is the advancement of technology, where technology such as smartphones whose features and applications are increasingly attractive have hypnotized, poisoned, and made people forget the importance of interacting or socializing. Unfortunately, why is that always being said?
Many people like to criticize society today, including me sometimes. To the author, these people seem to be so proud of their past romance, that they often make us feel so bad about the present. They say that the past is always better and holier. And in the millennial era like now, where smartphones are everywhere, spontaneously blamed it for several social problems that exist in society.
Of course, it is a valid reason when it is used as a reflection of the use of technology that is not appropriate and criticizes bad behavior. However, if you directly blame technology as the main cause of social problems lately, it is very unsuitable and is not based on correct data or research.
If you look at the reality, such as in surfing, InternetLiveStats notes, there were 3,424,971,237 people actively surfing in 2016 and the number always increases every year. Especially if you look recently, when Google and social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others continue to develop their features, so that people are more comfortable with their devices and make their users increase, critics are even more confused. Finally, they also created an account, then continued their criticism, which used to be through stories, now writing them on the wall of their network.
Blaming technology as the root of social problems, especially in interactions as it is now, is so naive in reality. For example, when you are hanging out and chatting, there is one person who leaves the focus of the conversation to reply to a chat, some people immediately blame and grab the gadget. Or when they see people who are selfies, many criticize that the person is narcissistic, pretentious, and others. Yet unconsciously and very hypocritically, they themselves are doing the same thing. Maybe this chat is very important and must be answered immediately. The question of sneering at selfies, they are so happy when they see the results of selfies on Instagram.
For some people, technological advances like now are so desirable. Because for those who need fast access to find information and do not require a lot of money, it is highly anticipated, or for those who feel that their life is lonely, they are no longer lonely because of the attractive features and easy long-distance communication that reduces painful loneliness.
Here I interpret technological progress, especially smartphones, as a medium and renewable communication tool that makes it easier. When it comes to the birth of social problems that exist in our society, it is proper not to immediately blame technology which is very urgent like now. Whoever is anti-technology will be left behind because of the many things that are present in the technology. Anti is not the solution in this case.
If there are social problems like individualism, the loss of interaction between people in society, and the like, for me, this is a matter of how mature we are as children of the age. In an era where thousands of scholars graduate each year on only one campus out of the thousands of campuses in the world, of course, it can be said that we are not a stupid or stone-age society. Regarding the attitude of the use of inappropriate technology or bad behavior in technology, it should be about a group of people who are closed-minded and do not have a social vision.
It is undeniable that advances in information and technology have greatly helped us in facilitating things that were once so difficult and impossible to become possible. Of course, we don't want an era like that. Just want to ask how you are, you have to wait up to a week or even a month, want something or want to buy something, you don't have to look around the area from morning to night which costs a lot of money, you have to have a photo album, you have to wash and dry it and even then the results may not be as expected, don't know where people are happy to be and so on.
Stop blaming technology for social problems. We are human, we still realize that we are not robots. You should really understand how to run the social wheel itself.
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