There’s no debate in saying whether technology is highly discussed or not, but there is a debate in whether it is good or bad. For many years, people have made countless claims about the pros and cons of using technology. The majority of the people in this country use technology, and even those who make claims that technology isn’t good ironically find themselves using it everyday. We find ourselves on social media, researching, writing, shopping, playing games. Yet after many years of debating, we still haven’t fully come to a conclusion on this topic. But many wouldn’t have been able to share their views on the this topic so easily if it wasn’t for their access to technology. So in reality, whether we think technology is good or bad, it’s everywhere.

Pros

If you were to ask someone why they thought technology was a good thing, their answer would most likely be that it allows for easy communication. Especially nowadays, there are so many different ways to communicate with people besides texting and calling. These new apps allow for communication and self-expression. In Jenna Wortham’s essay, How I Learned to Love Snapchat, she points out the use of this app and how it is leading the new way to communication. Take a picture, add a short caption, press send. It allows for an easier way to understand what a person is implying. It is also a easier and faster way to communicate, for example, if you are trying to tell a friend a story or just trying to explain something, but you don’t want to type it all out, you can take a quick video and when you’re done just press send. Saves time and the hassle of trying to type it all out.

Additionally, Wortham states that snapchat allows for self-expression. She says it is a place to be yourself, and that it is not a place where you go to be pretty. We can compare Snapchat to apps like Instagram and Facebook and find that those apps are more “formal” than Snapchat. On the other hand, Snapchat is seen to be less formal and more of a place where you can share whatever you want. Snapchat incorporates filters, funny filters, which allow for self expression of a person, whether they wanna add the filter to be funny or not. You can draw on your picture, add stickers, you can alter the picture to make it your own and how you want others to see it. This app is very common in kids and adolescents, and Snapchat allows them to express who they are and to learn to be open and expressive with who they are at young age. If a kid doesn’t have Snapchat, it might cause them to feel left out and feel isolated from everyone else. Having Snapchat, which comes from using technology, allows them to communicate with their friends, self-express and to ultimately feel like they fit in.

With technology taking over and being the center of most of our lives, it surprisingly has been making us smarter. You are probably asking how, and here are some answers. We use it every single day of our lives-unless you decide to isolate yourself from technology-for anything and everything. An example of this is seen in Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Thompson discovers a chess master that was beaten by a computer, which led him to the conclusion that our digital tools are making us smarter. This game of chess lead to the discovery that you didn’t even have to be good at chess to win against someone like a chess grandmaster. You just had to be skilled in knowing how to use a computer which would then aid you in winning against someone who was a professional at chess. The computer would show them a bunch of different moves that they didn’t even think of, allowing for a greater imagination and for creative playing that they wouldn’t have done before. This evidence is crucial, proving that technology makes you smarter in allowing you to learn new things. Learning new things allows for greater self confidence and a drive to want to explore more things that you didn’t know before.

Going off of Thompson’s example of the chess game, even if we don’t play chess, technology is still greatly used to teach other things. For example, it is now used in schools starting in elementary, or even pre-school, to aid in the learning of school subjects like math, reading, writing, science, etc.

Cons

Technology is taking over the world and while it may seem as if it is as a good thing, there are many things that cause it to also be a bad thing. If you were to ask someone why they thought technology was a bad they would most likely answer saying that it affects us and our health, and they’re somewhat correct. In chapter nine of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, talks about the internet and how it affects our memory; how technology became an “artificial memory” for us, being able to store everything so we can go find it instead of using our brains to think about it. Carr brings up some scientific points talking about how our “…synapses change with experience…” (Carr 182). The synapses are what are in our brain and they work when we try to memorize something. The more we work it, the more better we get at memorizing things. But if we don’t practice memorizing stuff, we lose that habit, lose that memory, and it tends to get replaced with something else.

“The Net quickly came to be seen as a replacement…to personal memory” (Carr 180). We as humans do not take the time to think about stuff anymore and it is causing an effect on the way this next generation thinks. We will start to rely on the computer right away to find things or to store things. People will create a habit of being lazy, wanting to search right away instead of taking the time to think. We train our brain to think of a way to find the solution, instead of finding the actual solution.

Overall, the debate about technology will probably be discussed for many more years to come. There are many pros and cons about the use of our digital devices, but ultimately it all comes down to each person individually and their own biases. The future is open to whatever and there will always be a good and a bad to something, so what side will you take?

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows. New York, W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2010.

Thompson, Clive. “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better.” They Say I Say, edited by Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, Russel Durst, W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2018, pp. 441-461

Wortham, Jenna. “How I Learned to Love Snapchat.” They Say I Say, edited by Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, Russel Durst, W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2018, pp. 474-479.