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. This restricts the ability to have genuine conversations and develop relationships. She says in this that kids are not able to show genuine emotions towards one another because they are too busy on their phones in a fantasy world. This shows that these three authors have the same view about technology.

Turkle, Tyler and Katie all have the same idea. They all believe that technology is destroying the next generation’s ability to feel empathy towards one another. While they have different specifics on how it affects us, Tyler says that technology causes anxiety in kids while Turkle and Katie say that technology is affecting the younger generation by reducing the amount of empathy they can feel for one another. These authors differ in the ways that they want to change the problem. Tyler sees this as unintended dangers that happened to appear from phones being a thing: “These examples, although some of the more apparent ones, are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the unintended dangers and consequences associated with technology. While it was created to provide users with information at their fingertips, technology has unintentionally created a world with an increased sense of anxiety and automation.” He is saying in this quote that there are unintended consequences with technology being a thing, but it was not supposed to be like that. Katie believes that there is a balance to be achieved with technology and your livelihood. She says that: “Through all the challenges and benefits there are serious concerns that need to be addressed to find a healthy, balanced life.” In this quote she says that, yes there are lots of negatives and lots of positives to technology, but it is all about how you overcome those negatives to do better in life.

              Technology can destroy our lives if it is not used properly. These authors have shown that there is a clear agreement on the fact that technology is bad for us. The place that they differ is the fact about how it is a problem to us where some believe that it is just a natural cause that comes from having technology all around us. Others believe that technology can be harnessed to our own good, that it is on us to balance the use of technology, and we can reduce the negatives that come from the use of it. Technology can be controlled, it just takes control from the user to limit their own use of technology and the only we  will be able to overcome this struggle is with self-control.

Works Cited

Pelletier, Tyler https://miller-eng110-1.uneportfolio.org/2025/03/31/journal-23/#comments

McGuire, Katie https://miller-eng110-1.uneportfolio.org/2025/03/31/journal-23/#comments

Turkle, Sherry, author. The Empathy Diaries : a Memoir. New York :Penguin Press, 2021.