Can you hear me now free essay sample

Nowadays, technology is an important part of people’s lives. It creates a great impact on our work, our education, and our daily life. Thus, in the article â€Å"Can You Hear Me Now? † written by Sherry Turkle and published in Forbes magazine in 2007, the author writes about how technology affects people today. According to this article, Turkle is saying how technology harms to modern life. She says that by using and depending too much on communication devices, people lose their real connection to others and important time for themselves. As a result, technology is a cause which makes people become more attached to their cell phones, laptops, or electronic devices than their society. She shows how communication gadgets interrupt real conversation and lead people to develop an intimate relationship with machines more than with real people. She points out that technology is a distraction when people maintain and live with both the virtual life and the real word. Based on my own personal experiences and research findings, I absolutely agree with Turkle’s argument that the strong attachment to technology makes negative effects in our lives. First of all, attachment to technology affects humans’ minds by making people alienated from social relationships with other people. In the beginning of Turkle’s article, the author is right when she writes â€Å"Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected-or more alienated. † (270). She is saying that because they are addicted to technology, people seem to be locked up themselves with their electronic gadgets and forget their interactions with the real world and real people around them. I agree with Turkle’s view that technology makes people isolate themselves by depending too much on electronic devices. She describes the problem that people feel more comfortable tied to the virtual life of technology than the real world. As an illustration, I would like to give an example from my life. Last summer, I opened an account on an online dating website because I wanted to have a new boyfriend. After three days on vietsingle. com, I got some messages from some guys, and started chatting with them on my phone. Dating online made me feel more comfortable and confident because the person I liked could not see me. Thus, in just one week, I became addicted to text messages from some guys whom I met from this website. When I went to my cousin’s birthday party, I constantly checked my messages and didn’t care about other people around me. Thus, I lost my opportunities to have a boyfriend in my real life, and I seemed to be alone at this party. Because of being addicted to text messages with cyber companions, I became more isolated from my real world and lost chances to have real relationships. After wasting three months of dating online, I believe that Turkle is right when she claims that being dependent on technology takes people further apart from their real lives. In addition, depending too much on technology makes a bad impact on people’s morality. As an illustration, Turkle states â€Å"Might such robotic arrangements even benefit the elderly and their children in the short run in a feel-good sense but be bad for us in our lives as moral being? † (280). The author claims that because of many good benefits of technology, people become more addicted to modern machines and the virtual world than their real life. And because of attaching to technology, people seem to lose their respect for human beings. I completely agree with Turkle on this argument about the issue that being strongly dependent on technology could affect or change our morality negatively. Specifically, I have the example of my neighbor’s son. He is just twelve years old, and he is addicted to violent games on the internet. Thus, he repeats aggression and violent action from those games, and he tends to use violence in real life to solve his problems. Once in the morning, I saw him throw his breakfast and his backpack towards his parents as they walked him to the school bus. Because he just wanted to stay home and play games all day instead of going to school. He pretended to be the characters in violent games, so he was very aggressive in solving his problems in reality. I feel sorry for his parents and him because the affect of playing computer games makes him a bad child, losing the respect for his parents. Moreover, I have another example of this issue that demonstrates Turkle’s point through the article â€Å"Technology Addiction Takes Toll in Asia†. In this article, Phillip Lim states â€Å"A month earlier, a 15-year-old boy committed suicide after killing his mother for scolding him over his gaming habits. † In addition, â€Å"In May 2010, a 41-year-old South Korean man was sentenced to two years in jail after he and his wife left their baby daughter to die of malnutrition while raising a virtual child on the Internet. † After reading this article, I felt shocked about how a young boy and the couples could do that with their parents and their children just because of gaming online. These stories make me question about what our morality today is. People seem to be losing their humanity and their cares for the real world and real people around them because of the attachment to technology. This point of Turkle is important because technology influences most of our lives in this world today. Furthermore, attachment to technology causes a distraction from our daily lives. In Turkle’s article, she maintains that â€Å"Once done surreptitiously, the habit of self-splitting in different worlds is becoming normalized. † In making this comment, the author is saying that engaging in technological devices most of all the time is the cause that makes people become distracted from their true self. Technology makes people keep busy and seem to get lost with maintaining two different lives. She also stresses that being addicted to technology leads our minds to become rather compartmentalized and makes us lose concentration. I endorse the author’s point that multitasking and sticking with technological gadgets makes us split our attention. For instance, I have a sad story about my cousin’s friend. He was killed in an accident when he was on his way home after work. The main cause was his car was hit by a guy who was texting while driving. This story makes me think that people today indeed are losing their focus on the right things when using their cell phones, laptops, or other electronic devices. In addition, I have another example about myself. I’m addicted to text messages, so I text message everywhere and every time even though I’m in class. Because I often text message during classes, it distracts me from the lecture. Thus, I lose my focus on studying and have to ask my friend about the contents of the lessons after classes. It wastes my time and affects my grades negatively. Essentially, Turkle is arguing that the benefit of technology makes our lives become more convenient and interesting, but we need to keep the true value of our reality. In conclusion, I would like to say that the article â€Å"Can You Hear Me Now? † by Sherry Turkle is really a strong and thoughtful argument about the negative effects to human life today from depending too much on technology. This article has many good examples and observations to support Turkle’s opinion. I absolutely agree with Turkle that strong attachment to modern technology such as cell phones, laptops, or the internet makes people seem to lose their morality, forget to focus on things that matter, and become estranged from their real relationships with other people. Turkle succeeds in making people believe in her opinion by pointing out a problem about the harmfulness of being deeply dependent on technology in our lives. Some people today seem to go crazy if they can not connect with their communication devices for just one day. From this article, I learned a good lesson about how to control myself and stop being addicted to technology. Turkle convinces me to spend less time texting on my phone and more time focusing on things that matter to me.