Steven Arning
Technology: Too Much of a good Thing?
In today’s society communication and technology within communications has become an incredible part of everyday life. The media has a part in all of our lives, no matter how distant we try to make ourselves from it. With all the new ways of communicating electronically, society and the way it is run is changing on a global level. It appears that most new forms of communication are geared towards making communication faster and easier. You can now communicate with other people while doing almost any other activity. As I write this essay I also have the ability to communicate with others using the internet, if I choose. Communication in gaming has become an essential part of most children’s gaming experience within the past few years. Major corporations have in a way, “caught wind” of the ease of communications, and have incorporated many forms of communications into their companies. Although communications and technology within communication is a vast topic, I would like to discuss three main topics; first how the ease of communication in everyday life may have negative results on people, namely students. Second, discuss how major corporations are using already existing communications games as a form of communication within the corporations, and lastly, discuss how many companies are using games as a way to market their goods, and recruit new workers. I will use information from “Digital Nation: life on the virtual frontier” as the basis for my paper.
In today’s fast moving, electronic world, it is hard to keep up with the technology that is being introduced to the public. The technology you own today will be old tomorrow and, more importantly, the technology you understand today will be different and more confusing tomorrow. Children and young adults have the best chance of keeping up with the fast moving technology. The current generation of young people is introduced to forms of technology that were the craziest of dreams twenty years ago. Many schools have even taken the extra step of requiring the students to have his or her own laptop, and sometimes in as early as first grade! Does all this technology have a negative effect on today’s youth? As much as I would like to say it does not, I believe it does have a somewhat negative effect. With technology leaning towards everything being fast, and easy, books have taken a back seat in children’s lives. In the documentary, “Digital Nation,” a student claims he hasn’t read a book in years, the reason being that it simply takes too much time, and there are other options available on the internet that give three or four page summaries for books hundreds of pages long. We could be witnessing the death of great literature that has been read for centuries. New forms of literature are certainly not in the making either. Professors and teachers alike are saying that with all the distractions of the internet and the fact that so much of communication is designed so you can multitask, is greatly affecting the way people are writing. Students are beginning to write in paragraphs instead of full, flowing essays. In “Digital Nation,” they say that students will write a paragraph, check their email, write another paragraph, and then check their FaceBook and so on and so on. There is no flow of ideas through the papers that are being written at colleges and high schools. The overall learning capability of students has become a battle with technology. While in class, kids don’t want to be paying attention when they could be surfing the web, viewing “youtube” videos, or checking Facebook. Technology has created a constant distraction that is being marketed as a “good” distraction. The way the media presents all of these new technological advancements is that they all can be used while doing other things and that is ok. It prevents people from seeing the potential negatives of many of these products.
All these advancements in technological communication have caught the eye of many major corporations in some very different ways. There is one innovative way a corporation is using technological communication that I found very interesting. In the video “Digital Nation,” they spoke about a corporation that is using an existing video game as a means for corporate meetings. The video game Second Life is a game based on every-day life, where the player of the game creates a virtual “life” where he or she can fly and have any occupation, home, car, etc. The basis of the game is to allow users to create their dream “life,” in which they are free to do whatever they want, anything is possible. This particular corporation began using this game, Second Life, as a means to communicate on a global level. The company sets up “secure” locations for various employees to meet, and discuss matters of business. It’s a fairly simple concept, the employees get trained on how to use the game, and then are able to communicate with distant branches through the game. Representatives from the corporation said that it made the meetings more personal than a simple intercom phone conversation. What could this mean for the future concept of going to work? For years the concept of work has been a job where you leave your home, do the work required of you, and then come back home. It is healthy for a person to leave their home, and feel that he has provided for his family. It keeps a person going day after day, and this new concept of holding virtual meetings destroys the definition of going to work. Companies will slowly lose the need to have their employees in work, because all the work that needs to be done could be done at home. Why spend the money to keep a large building open and full of employees, when there is no need for them to be there? On a larger scale, down the line, public transportation would begin to suffer, as would many small businesses that depend on traveling workers. Society as a whole would begin to crumble and fall apart. Imagine a world where no one went to work; city streets at the height of rush hour, vacant except for a few tourists. Public trains that run every few hours because no one needs to take them. Parking lots upon parking lots of abandoned busses, taxis, and cars. A world where no one leaves their homes except for pleasure or for things they need. This is a potential outcome of doing business in a virtual world. Now, the way many business would like for it to go, is to have people doing business from their offices, only in an easier, less expensive way. Their employees would virtually never have to fly to another state/ country again. Even in this scenario I see negative results. I feel as if there is no connection between people when they meet in a virtual environment. The professional trust that develops between people would be completely lost in the virtual interaction. There are a series of other problems I see with this concept, for instance computer hackers and viruses. Not to mention fraud that develops in a system that is entirely online. A world with people doing everything inside is a world I, personally want no part of. While discussing people staying in their homes and not leaving, I would now like to discuss another, smaller cause of this, video gaming.
Playing video games appeals to people of all ages, from mere toddlers to adult men with families, and continues to become more appealing every day. We found out in “Digital Nation,” that some countries are now considering extensive video gaming as an addiction. Some countries have even gone as far as to create recovery centers for recovering video game addicts, where the people are removed from technology and taught about its harmful side for long periods of time. Video games provide people with the escape from everyday life that they long for so strongly. The documentary, “Digital Nation,” speaks of one corporation that has realized the benefits of the general public’s attachment to gaming. The United States Army. The Army has created a new type of store, based primarily off the concept of the Macintosh, Apple Store. The “idea” is to sell the product by allowing the potential buyer a “hands on experience.” The U.S. Army’s main product? Positions as soldiers in the army. The new Army store has rows and rows of comfortable chairs and flat screen, high definition televisions. People, mainly young adults come to the store, and play various realistic war videogames like, “Call of Duty- Modern Warfare,” and other real, first-person simulators. While playing these “games,” the players are approached by various U.S. Army representatives, who have the job of recruiting new members into the Army. Although perfectly legal, I would have to question the ethics behind this new practice. I have had the pleasure of playing the realistic war video games the Army is using in their new store, and I would be the first to say that they provide the gamer with a “rush” of sorts. They get your adrenaline pumping. While these young kids are feeling that they are invincible, and getting a false depiction of war, they have army recruiters breathing down their necks hoping that the “potential buyer” will purchase their product, a few years in the military. Video games; virtual interactions in general can be deceiving. The people in the Army store are receiving a false idea of how war actually is whether they like it or not. In the documentary, they show a study where children were exposed to virtual reality in which they swam with whales. After only a week after the experiment, a large percentage of the children actually believed that they had swam with whales in SeaWorld. Now I understand that video games are not nearly as vivid of an experience as virtually reality, but I cannot help but wonder if people are steered to like what they have done in video games because the experience was so entertaining. It is almost as if the Army has an “advantage” over the people they are trying to recruit in that they have in a way “made” them like the idea of war even before they discuss it with them.
Technology is all around us. It has taken over even the smallest parts of our everyday lives, and has now taken over communication. Many of the technological advancements that have developed with communications are for the better, but some although intended to be positive advances, have negative sides as well. I have discussed three different ways in which technological advancements in communications have downsides. First I discussed how technology in the school environment can have negative results with the students. It is feared that today’s youth is losing track of the great works of literature we have read for years. The ease of reading summaries provided by the environment is far to appealing for children to spend time reading books. At the same time students are no longer producing any great works of literature, merely because of the many technological distractions present to them every day. Next, I moved on to discuss how major corporations have begun to use advancements in technology with communications as a means to better the company. The video game, “Second Life” has been deployed in a few corporations as a means to hold professional meetings with other branches. There are many negative aspects to this concept which I have discussed. Lastly, I discussed how video games can be very addictive, and how the United States Army has begun using war video games for recruiting new members into the military. They do this through their new “Apple-inspired Army Store.” There are many different directions the world can take with all these new technological advancements in the next few years. I am both interested as well as terrified to see what the future holds.
