Technology has evolved significantly in the past few decades. From cell phones to social media, there are hundreds of different ways for people to communicate with others at their leisure. Although these changes can speed up communication in a good way, there are many down sides to this increase in the ways to communicate.

With this increase in technology, there has been a decrease in face-to-face communication. Even just calling someone instead of texting them has become taboo. Why would you call a person when it is so much easier to text him or her?

As a society, we have become much more dependent on the technology at our disposal. For instance, many people no longer memorize phone numbers because their cell phones have a wonderful contact list which makes that memorization unnecessary. If these people didn’t have their cell phones in an emergency, they would not be able to contact the people they would need.

Another drawback with new technology, such as social media, is that there are countless examples when people create rumors or have been misinformed due to the desire to get information out as fast as possible. This ranges from the miniscule he said, she said rumors to more major examples where news stations have been misinformed and then that information was broadcast across the country.

For example, there was a post floating around social media websites during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15 which stated that an 8-year-old girl was killed in the blast when it was actually an 8-year-old boy. This information was not true but it was spread around very quickly and very little people seemed to question it’s validity. We have reached a time when information is taken as fact simply because we hadn’t seen anything to the contrary.

This dependence extends beyond just technology used for communication. Devices such as calculators can be seen as a hindrance when unavailable as well. Honestly, how many high school students are able to perform math functions without the ease of a calculator? They could do it eventually, but they would complain about not having a calculator the entire time while doing it.

The point is that we, as a society, must be able to operate on a basic level without technology. Yes, technology makes our lives easier and quicker, but this needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We should live our lives with the aid of technology because we want to, not because we have to.