The world of technology is widely controversial. There are people who believe that technology is not doing anything good for us at all and it’s making us, in a sense, move backwards. On the flip side there are people who worship technology and believe that we couldn’t live without it. After reading Nick Carr’s, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” article Carr is more on the side that technology is not helping us. Then after reading Kevin Kelly’, “Technophilia” article it was very clear that he was not in agreement with Carr and loves technology. Although there are parts of Carr’s essay that I do agree with, I believe that I agree more with Kevin Kelly. While keeping Kelly’s essay in the back of my mind I read through my peer’s essays and decided which ones disagreed or agreed with Kelly.

In Kelly’s Technophilia article he starts off his argument with an interesting story about his friend’s daughter and how she was physically sick when they punished her by taking her phone away. Kelly explains, “Immediately the girl became physically sick. Faint, nauseous, and so ill she couldn’t get out of bed. It was if her parents had amputated a limb. And in a way they had”. This got me thinking about how people today use their phone to communicate with people they love who they can’t be in person with. The reason why I thought of this is because when you lose someone it can make you physically sick, whether they passed away or you just don’t speak anymore. The girl that Kelly mentions in his story is, in a sense, having all these people ripped away from her at once. Without her phone she probably feels an immense amount of loneliness that comes from not being able to speak to people she loves and cares about, which could be where the sickness she is experiencing is coming from. After thinking about this I happened to read Kayleena’s Technology Essay where she explains how her phone has been her way of staying in touch with family back home in Michigan. “I am from Michigan which is about a 13-hour straight drive from the University of New England… having a phone where I can call, text, or facetime my family is amazing”. If we didn’t have such advanced technology, then this wouldn’t be possible. In this case the love for our phones stems from the people who are on our phones. This isn’t the full reason, but it plays a part.

The thought that technology is taking over is not a crazy thing to think. Technology is everywhere, anywhere, all the time. Theres more technology in this world than our brains could ever even comprehend. The number of times humans use some form of technology a day is an unthinkable amount. That leads me to the question of, what if we didn’t have this technology? Many people lived their lives before us without the technology we have today and they were fine, but were they fine? Technology has helped us produce medicine that cures what were once uncurable diseases, technology gives us transportation to travel the world easier than it ever has been, technology allows us to help and protect our earth, and so many more amazing things that technology has helped us advance. Technology opens an endless world of opportunities for us as a society. As Kelly puts it, “Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysterious uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life”. The idea that the web “smells like life” was so interesting to hear. It brought my thoughts back to how we have so many people who we love and care about on our phones. Life is just flowing through our phones, social media, texts, calls, and apps. You can always find something going on in your phone which in a way means it’s alive all the time, and as Kelly says, “smells like life”. As for the rest of the quote from Kelly, it really puts into perspective how large and daunting the web is, like a jungle. So much room for growth and advancements. One thing I feel like people who fear technology tend to forget is that this world is changing every second all the time. Why don’t we take advantage of the change and look at all the positive outcomes. In Samanthas technology essay she uses the words, “I am of the belief that one should simply shift their perspective, looking not towards what is lost, but towards what has been gained”. Theres always going to be change whether we like it or not. Shifting out perspectives can shift our lives and I think it’s important for people who hate technology to at least try to look at it from a positive perspective.

With all these advancements it’s easy to be in the mindset that these new technologies are harming us, and at the rate of advancement people may even feel a sense of threat from these new technologies. One thing that I think about is how our phones and computers are one hundred times smarter than us. They can pick up on things we can’t, understand things we can’t, and spit out information at a speed that would be impossible for any human to achieve. On the more extreme end of this scale there are robots taking over people’s jobs and putting people out of work. However, on the less extreme side there’s things like Grammarly and spell check that do the dirty work for us. To some this may be annoying because the computer is outsmarting them and telling them what they need to do to fix what they have messed up. In Samanthas technology essay she shares, “I can, and do, rely on technological tools such as spell check and Grammarly to do a vast majority of the work for me”. For most people tools like this are extremely helpful and make the actual writing part easier so that they don’t have to worry about the little things.