Response 3

My mom walks into the TV room and gives my sister and me a glare. All I could think was what could that possibly before or what did I do wrong now? As I look around the room I notice that my sister is on her IPod Touch and on her laptop, and I am watching television and on my laptop. Then, I see my dad walk in the door from work talking on his Blackberry. Now I understand my mother’s glare.

Americans today tend to believe that the Net is the best way to connect with people. On the Internet you can meet people and talk to your friends, but what about connecting with the people who are physically around you. My own view, however, is that the most important relationship to have is with your family and distractions, like the Internet, can affect the relationship between a family. In the movie, “Digital Nation,” one of the first things that occurred was the narrator noticing how each of her family members is in their own virtual world because they are on their laptop or Iphone. Do we want our world to become a place where we can only connect with people through a technological device?

Carr states in his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that the Internet is “chipping away” at our ability to concentrate and “scatters” our attention, which could one day lead to a world where our values and cultures are lost. I agree that the Internet is a distraction and that our culture could be lost because my experience with writing an essay and trying to be on Facebook at the same time confirms it. The same exact thing applies to being with my family. I don’t agree that being with your family is something that can go out of style or just be in the past. Could familiar relationships be taken over by the technological era and is our world now going to become a virtual world? I believe that the technological era is going to hurt family connections.

As I compare my life before and after my laptop, IPod, and Facebook, I know an enormous amount of time has been lost to using those tools. Cascio argues that technology is improving our society and is making us smarter. Our society has not been improving since we were introduced to technology, it has become worse. Do you believe that improvement would be spending two hours a day on Facebook aimlessly looking at friend’s pictures and statuses? This is not the kind of activity that is going to improve our society. Instead of being on Facebook we should be spending time with the people we love, who are a lot more worth our time. We don’t want to be older and wish we had been closer with our family when we could have just made a simple change and not been on the Net for so many hours of the day.

Cascio suggests that it is important to keep using technology as much as we do and to develop it to its full extent, but try to picture a family of four all in separate rooms each on their separate laptops or phones. This does not sound like a happy family and it shouldn’t be because you have your family for life and you may have a phone for a year or two years. After all, it is better to have an exceptional family connections rather than great Internet connections.