Technology Addicts

When personal computers first became the rage in America, their advantages were all that most people cared about. College students no longer had to type and retype term papers because of typing errors; the text could be reworked as much as desired before printing a perfect page. The drudgery of mathematical calculations and(possibly the bane of all existence, the balancing of the personal checkbook(became a snap. Life in the technological age was certainly easier and more efficient.

What wasn't immediately apparent, though, was the fact that the technology came with lots of strings attached(strings to our feelings, our culture, and our mode of communicating with one another. Technology became part of the fabric of our everyday life, and thus integrated, it forced us to decide exactly where it belongs for each of us.

S. Paige Baty explores the role of technology in her own life in E-Mail Trouble. A self-confessed e-mail addict who admits to sending as many as 30 e-mails a day, Baty gives us a detailed view of the complex symbolic imagery her addiction gives rise to, as well as her personal relationship with technology, which seems to take on the character of an actual person for her.

For Baty, her description of her e-mail addiction is reminiscent of descriptions other addicts give of their addictions. "�the matrix was�about comfort. In the matrix, I did not have to live in my body. In the matrix, I could be whoever I wanted to be. In the

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ion for so many. While ostensibly connecting us with vast numbers of people across vast stretches of space, they still leave us with the same emptiness we brought to the table. Therein is the greatest shortcoming of technology as experienced by Baty: it cannot take the place of the real human interaction we desperately crave. Baty's addiction to it only intensified her craving; it never satisfied it. Andrew Feenberg addresses the issue of our relationship with technology in Questioning Technology. He astutely identifies that although there has been much debate as to whether technology controls our lives or we control technology, the root issue is the human significance of technology(what it means to us as people, and how it affects us in our everyday lives. Feenberg acknowledges the views of philosophers such as Heidegger, who felt the advance of the machine was dehumanizing; he politely disagrees, however. Instead, he sees technology as offering social choices that we can appropriate for our use or not, as we see fit. Since we live in a technological age, technology is the medium of our daily lives and central to the social and political structure of our society. No matter how much we try to separate technology from the

Category: Science - T