How Technology Affects our Lives Essay

Technology is very much a part of modern life. Many people see technology as force that escaped from human control, others feel that technology has improved the quality of life. The issue of technology being a part of modern life is a controversial one. Some feel that the contribution of technology has made a positive impact in modern life that technology helps improve the quality of life. But still it’s in a big question. Technology’s role in our lives is astonishing. Its effect on the way we communicate has changed the English language forever. In â€Å"In the Beginning Was the Word† Christine Rosen tells how technology has a huge negative effect on our lives today. She also explains that because we are so attached to our electronic devices, we are creating more distractions for ourselves. In â€Å"Three Tweets for the Web† Tyler Cowen believes that internet soon will completely overcome books. He also says that technology is forcing us to multitask. Today for younger generation internet can provide faster and more accurate information on Google than going to a library and doing a research. Cowen begins his essay that printed word isn’t dead yet and that we won’t end up on internet. He says â€Å"For today’s younger people, Google is more likely to provide a formative cultural experience than The Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22 or even the Harry Potter novels. There is no question that books are becoming less central to our cultural life† (245). We want to get the information quickly, we don’t want to wait extra hours or even days for it. Rosen says â€Å"Today, of course, abridgment and abbreviation are the norm, and our impatience for information has trained even those of us who never cracked an issue of Reader’s Digest to prefer 60-second news cycles to 62 condensed pages per month† (204). We pay more attention to the information which we got from the internet, than we did anywhe re else. At the same time technology is making us multitask, multitasking is not an easy thing to do and it takes a lot of brain activity. Cowen writes â€Å"The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information. Overall, that is a big plus for the new world order† (246). He also mentions â€Å"It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as information overload. We have all seen people scrolling with one hand through a BlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with the other and eyeing a television (I  will not say â€Å"watching†). But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, the reality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs – a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings† (246). Technology has even pushed authors to make the readings more consumer-friendly. Rosen explains that â€Å"The digital revolution has also transformed the experience of reading by making it more consumer-oriented. With the advent of electronic readers (and cellphones that can double as e-readers), the book is no longer merely a thing you purchase, but a service to which you subscribe. With the purchase of a traditional book, your consumer ends when you walk out of the bookstore. With a wirelessly connected Kindle or Iphone, or your Wi-Fi-enabled computer, you exist in a perpetual state of potential consumerism† (205). To sum everything up both, Christine Rosen and Tylen Cowen thinks that technology does have a huge impact to the language. It still has some good features, such as: it allows us to multitask faster and better, we can save time by just looking something up we need on Google, and for last if we still want to read a book, we can always just subscribe to a e-book provider, then you just download the e-book on your phone, tablet, or computer and here you go! So what all that means is that technology didn’t really killed printed word, even though we’re most likely to choose to read electronically, we still read.