Breeze Perspectives: For quick fix, just add gadgets
Formula for instant gratification includes our affinity for new technologies
Posted on February 7, 2008
Instant gratification is a phrase that has been coined to describe what our society expects from everyday life. Just walking to class or driving down the street can easily demonstrate this point. Where would we be without our cell phones, e-mail, instant messenger, text messaging, iPods and about a hundred more technological inventions of our time?
Though there are many positive aspects to these new technologies, it does make you wonder what negative side effects may be occurring. All of these new technologies may be causing us to lose appreciation for the events outside of them including face-to-face conversations, reading a letter and so forth.
At some point, all of us have had an attitude that if we do not get something immediately, we give up on it. How many times have we given up after 10 seconds of trying to load a Web site? We are living in a fast-paced world where we need things now or else it is too late.
New technology has positive aspects, but at the same time I feel it has sometimes taken away from the novelty of events in our lives. We begin to take things for granted because of the instantaneousness in our society. We all have a cell phone (sometimes literally) attached to our hip, we will many times either ignore a call or get frustrated while having to take the moment to talk with someone.
Many of us have learned in our history classes the slow process that it used to take to get one piece of mail from the sender to the receiver. It made it special for someone to receive mail, and I can imagine that they probably savored every word. With the invention of e-mail, we can instantly send a message to someone. I know that I am guilty of erasing e-mails before reading them because I get so many. We no longer take in every word that someone writes because of information overload. If we miss something in an e-mail, we can just send a quick text or place a call to the person to get the information instantaneously once again.
I have also noticed that when we write an e-mail or text message, we often overlook the way we write it. With a written letter, I am guessing there is not quite as much carelessness. It is very easy to type a quick e-mail with various abbreviations that we have learned, which is OK for an email to a friend. The problem is that it becomes so inborn that many times I have found I will use these even in a formal e-mail. I think we do this because we are in such a hurry that it is faster to just write sloppily. Also, we know that if we mess something up, we can just re-send it soon after.
Just walking to class, many times we will miss out on talking to someone because we have our iPods stuck in our ears, are looking down to type a quick text message, are talking away on our cell phones, or sometimes several of these at once. If we are doing all of this at the same time, how can we take the time to savor each of them? It becomes nearly impossible to pay complete attention to any of these.
Eventually, we are going to hit a limit as to how fast things can happen. We constantly require things faster and faster. What is going to happen when we hit this limit?
With all of this technology, it is still important that we take the time to socialize with others and actually pay attention to what they have to say. I think it is time that we slow down a little bit and begin to enjoy the simpler things in life once again.
Rachael McDaniel is a senior SMAD major.
