The Price Payed for Convenience

     As a child of the Internet, it is hard for me to fathom how technology affects the way we connect. On the one hand convenience of instant messages helps us to communicate with people halfway around the globe. On the other hand it hinders the thought put into a message. With the advent of the Internet, people are more apt to connect with people previously thought to be out of reach. My stand on technology is that there is a price to pay for convenience. The convenience we are privileged with is growing exponentially with the evolution of technology. What I have always been taught was there is no such thing as free. No matter what we do or how we do it, there will be consequences.

     Social media and electronic messaging defines the generation I am (somewhat) proud to call myself a part of. What we lack in quality we make up for in quantity. The sheer size of people we are “friends” with is astonishing by older standards. Take Facebook, most people on the social media site have between a hundred to thousands of friends. This was totally unheard of before the advent of the Internet because there was no way to keep up with all of those people. Although the advent of these social media sites have—for the most part—destroyed this generation’s memory and attention span. It was and still is perfectly possible to keep up with hundreds of friends without social media. Though even now I can say I don’t keep in touch with every friend I have on Facebook. This presents a question: how many people can we keep in touch with without social media? Taking the ones we see every day aside, I am left with one thing to do: ask my parents.

     I have heard from my parents—who grew up without the Internet or cell phones—that in their time they were forced to remember certain things such as phone numbers and addresses. That the only way to communicate with people outside of the regular crowd you hung around with was either phone or snail mail. And the only way to make those things worth your time was to put everything you had to say into one phone call or letter. This sounds to me like increased depth as opposed to the one-word-texts I so hate receiving. Today, however, no one has the need for those things, our cell phones and computers do it for us. Even the U.S. Post Office is suffering at the hands of technology.

     With the invention of the cell phone, what we used to have a pen and multiple notebooks for is kept in the small, preferably touch-screen device sitting snugly in our pockets. What's the price we pay for such a convenience, you might ask. From what I have seen and heard, when people have such a fancy device as an Iphone or Android, they tend to pay much less attention to what is going on in the real world. They are so focused on their phones, that they forget that there is an entire world around them!

     All in all, technology isn't all bad. In my book it just evens out to neutral. As I have said above, what technology lacks in quality it makes up for in quantity. That isn't saying that it is impossible to have deep, meaningful relationships over this ever expanding series of tubes. In fact, the convenience of technology multiplies the amount of depth in a conversation, with the right people. Those people are harder and harder to come by, it seems. I can't speak for the previous generations, but it seems to me that there are an increasing number of people who have no idea what a deep conversation is, let alone a relationship.

     The overall price of technology, social media, cell phones, and the Internet seems to be a decreasing number of deep relationships. The price payed for quantity is quality. That seems to be the overall rule in more than just human relationships. In the end, however, it all boils down to the choice of the user. If one chooses not to pay the price of depth for convenience, then it is his or her right to do so. Technology is nice, but the beauty of it is the ability to turn off the computer or phone and go outside to talk to people face to face.