A key focus of my blog is Technology. While the many inventions in our new digital world have made our lives easier and more pleasurable, they’ve also created numerous dangers. What are these? The following contributed post is entitled, 4 Benefits and Dangers of Technology.
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Image via Pixabay
The world we all live in today is completely dominated by technology, to an extent that would have been considered all but unthinkable even a few short years ago. We work at our computers, we arrive home and recline in front of our flat screen TV’s to indulge in a Netflix binge, and when it’s time to pick up groceries, we likely as not order them online, too.
Technology is by no means all good or all bad. It brings with it both tremendous benefits and potential downsides. The specific technology in question, and the context of its use, determine whether it’s ultimately positive or negative.
Here are a couple of benefits and dangers of technology, just to get you thinking about this issue more deeply.
Benefit: increased safety
Certain technologies undoubtedly lead to a safer world for the majority of people. Medical devices can detect potentially fatal conditions in the early stages and result in them being successfully treated. And even reviews of products and companies can prevent us from being exploited.
Then, of course, there are inventions like the police speed gun, used to prevent dangerous behaviour on the road, and catch people who flagrantly violate speed laws.
Not only are there broad social benefits to these kinds of technologies, but even on a personal level, you may benefit immensely from certain safety-oriented tools and devices.
That’s where organizations like Genesis Reference Laboratories are becoming so critical. These institutions are used by private businesses and governments to explore the effects of specific technologies further and to understand them more before rolling them out to the general population. Given the power of today’s innovations, it is no longer appropriate to move forward and break things in the name of speed. Things have to be done properly.
Danger: the risk of being lost in an artificial world that plays on our psychological weak spots
It’s no secret that the creators of the world’s leading social media platforms, not to mention videogames, employ a variety of psychological tricks and mechanisms in order to exploit our basic human impulses to keep us invested in the services or products they’re offering.
This becomes a danger, especially when we’re unaware of the fundamentally addictive — and often intentionally manipulative — nature of these platforms and tools.
Author Adam Alter, writing in his book “Irresistible”, describes many instances of people whose real-world lives have been negatively impacted, often to an extreme degree, by their inability to escape the more instantly gratifying artificial world of technology.
Benefit: new ways to communicate ideas and seek knowledge from around the world
Virtually yesterday, historically speaking, the internet didn’t exist — and even for years after its creation, it was nowhere near the kind of all-encompassing encyclopedic resource that it is today.
With the development of the internet has come a previously unprecedented opportunity for the average person to communicate ideas and seek knowledge from around the world.
Personal blogs and videos bypass the need for traditional media and publishing gatekeepers. Tools like Wikipedia render a virtually limitless pool of facts and trivia accessible to all.
Danger: a more shallow and distracted kind of awareness
“The Shallows” is a book by author Nicholas Carr, in which the author underlines some of the evidence for the fact that the internet has made us all more shallow and distracted than ever before.
This is an idea that’s been corroborated by various findings and theories, for years now. Simply put — with the internet, we have a pool of information as wide as the ocean to play in. But it’s as deep as a paddling pool, and means we have a broad but shallow, and distracted, awareness of many topics.
Reading books and doing traditional studying, on the other hand, theoretically helps to create a deeper and more focused kind of awareness.
