Evolution of Technology and What it Means for the Art of Communication

         For the first few weeks of class, we have been breaking down technologies part in computer mediated 

communications. As a communications student here at Penn State, I especially found this concept rather 

interesting since I’ve only ever gave my focus to the communications half of modern communications 

instead of the technology side.

Our professor showed us data showing the amounts of time during the day the average American spends online. Personally, I figured I was the average simply using three hours per day, however when I truly thought about it I am in a much higher percentile. When considering all the time I’m online for either school or personal reasons combined with all my social media, I am defiantly a ritualized user. A ritualized user is someone that is frequently online either websites or social media and uses it as a diversion. 

An example of this would be an innocent I had over the last week of summer. My grandparents own a farm where there is little to no cellphone. Although it was only for a week and I loved my visit with family, I felt completely disconnected to the world. My nana, who owns the farm I was staying at, doesn’t own a computer or a cellphone. Seeing the difference in how my grandmother’s generation and my generation value technology is eye-opening.

Compared to the average American, college students or more vaguely my generation, spend more towards four to six hours a day online. I don’t think there is several reasons to explain this data.

For starters, we grew up with technology. As kids, we were exposed to the dial-up internet and used CD or cassette players. As we grew up, technology kept advancing. Our generation grew a dependency for technology at such a young age, it’s only expected that we kept that attachment as we grew up. 

Not only is our generation attached to technology, we are obsessed with our social presence. Our social presence is a window we created for the outside world. A peak into our personal life that we can edit, filter, and make appear as we assume fitting. This can sometimes turn into a not so honest personification.

Our social presences is molded to however we see fitting. We create an entire new person online without any second thoughts. This concept is how people can escape their real world troubles and create the life they always wanted. When we use technology or social media, we are using it to communicate and build our social presence. We avoid responsibility and reality to create the relationships we desire online.

Technology has become such an essential tool for communication. It’s turndown the walls of long distant relationships and dramatically increases the convince of our conversation efforts. We get the instant gratification we are looking for when using technology.

Our world is permanently connected online, with technology updating constantly we are always presented with better ways to utilize technology to enhance our communication skills.