Progress Or Isolation?

Who Has the Time?

It’s touted that technology saves you time and helps you communicate better. But isn’t it more apparent that technology now leaves us with so little time that we barely have occasion to properly interact with others?

Anything that “saves time” is simply making more time that you can then devote to some other pursuit. Dishwashers were created to be modern time-and-effort-reducing marvels, but did people just sit around and relax after the dishes were being washed? No, because all the “extra time” created by technology has only served to increase the hectic pace of our lives, allowing us to do more and more in less and less time.

What about the cell phones, which are just as important as our wallets and keys when we leave home? Promoted as easy and inexpensive ways to communicate, they have ultimately diminished the personal aspect of communication.

Which brings us to…texting, and that’s another beast altogether, having reduced our language skills to nothing more than emojis and run-on sentences without a care for proper grammar. Email and smartphone messaging apps have replaced the answering machine as the new way to ignore communication. The sender feels good because at least they made an effort to get in touch, but the recipient is in the privileged position of responding whenever they wish.

Ideally, with all of this technology at our fingertips, we would all be able to sit down at home with undivided attention and give someone an hour of quality time on or off the phone or, perhaps, to sit down with pen and paper and actually hand-write a personal letter or greeting card to a friend or relative. But really, who has the time?