Franco Leehive

English 110

Professor Miller

22 April 2025

The Adverse Relationship With Technology

Technology is making the younger generations less able to deal with social interactions. Technology used to be this very exclusive thing that people would only be able to use once a day or so and for the most necessary of cases. For one there used to be these big computer labs where you needed to go to them to use one or even send an email. Computers used to be a very prized possession. Now they are everywhere, and I mean everywhere. We have one on our person at any time, this sounds like a bad thing, but it really is not. The problem comes with the person who is using it. Anybody can use a phone to its fullest potential, but it all comes with learning how to use and manage that addiction in the real world so that you do not get swept into it. Tyler Pelletier, a First-Year student at the University of New England, who is currently enrolled in English 110, believes that technology is making the world today a more anxious one and that Technology is a useful tool that people should use in proper ways. Katie McGuire, another First-Year student at the University of New England, who is currently enrolled in English 110, believes a similar viewpoint in that different mental health problems, like anxiety. She also believes that there are benefits to technology but there are concerns that need to be fixed before we can advance. Sherry Turkle is a researcher from MIT who studied Psychology and has written numerous pieces on how technology affects people. Her most notable work, “The Empathy Diaries,” shows us how technology destroys our ability to feel empathy towards each other. Technology in my eyes, is humanities greatest gift and we need to learn how to utilize it properly to get out of it the best we can. These texts all together agree on the fact that technology is negatively affecting us, now to the extent that is affecting us can be disputed.

              Technology is being used today in ways it has never been used before. Nowadays, digital technology is being used not for effective communication as much as it is being used for pure entertainment. People will spend their entire day just listening to what other people are saying and what they think. This chronic online pandemic is damaging people more than we can even believe. In Sherry Turkle’s “The Empathy Diaries”, an essay that discusses how technology is negatively affecting how kids are feeling empathy, she argues that kids are becoming less able to feel empathy towards their peers and others. In an experience a principal had with a 7-year-old student who was sent there because she was excluding another from playing with them, the student talked about how she does not feel empathy or emotion toward other students.

[The seventh grader] was almost robotic in her response. She said, ‘I don’t have feelings about this.’ She couldn’t read the signals that the other student was hurt. These kids aren’t cruel. But they are not emotionally developed. Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like eight-year-olds would play. They don’t seem able to put themselves in the place of other children. They say to other students: ‘You can’t play with us.’ They are not developing that way of relating to where they listen and learn how to look at each other and hear each other. (Turkle 345)

Turkle describes this feeling the child felt as “forever elsewhere”, meaning that the child is not thinking about what is happening right where she is, but pushing off whatever is happening now and thinking about where else she could be, like her phone or other technology. I feel that this is not a very good way to live your life. If people are constantly feeling “forever elsewhere” then that means nothing in society will ever get done because nobody is thinking about the now and only thinking about what they could be doing instead of what they are currently doing. In response to this, Tyler, when discussing how technology affects the mental side of people, says that:

Anxiety, specifically social anxiety, has increased dramatically since the emergence of digital technology and the apps that accompany it. I have found that people, mostly the younger generations including adolescents, teens, and young adults, are stricken with a sense of fear and anxiety whenever they are tasked with social interactions that force them to speak without a screen rather than being buried behind one. (Pelletier)

              Tyler, in this paragraph, discusses how screens are negatively affecting the way that people’s levels of anxiety. He is saying that most people try to avoid public situations because they have become so accustomed to being on their phones and do not know anything else to do. When discussing how technology affects our ability to communicate effectively, Katie talks about how it can help us talk with people that we have been separated from: “Apps like messages and calls that give me the opportunity to speak with my parents, family and friends who are miles aways in New Jersey.” She also realizes that there is a very apparent negative side to it, and it starts with the younger generations having access to all this technology: “It has become rare that you see a kid or my age group without their phone or a form of technology at places like restaurants or the dining hall.