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Are Americans Addicted to Technology?
jomammy writes "According to a recent Wired article, the majority of Americans are becoming increasingly dependant on their gadgets. High speed internet seems to be the one most determined to be a 'necessity'. A third of the country is said to pay more than $200.00 a month for their addiction, where 4 out of 10 pay between $100.00 and $150.00 a month. Other items in this list of 'gadgets' include, mp3 players, dvd players, laptops, handhelds, etc." How addicted are we? How addicted are you?
Help! I keep refreshing Slashdot! Oh no!
"According to a recent Wired article, the majority of Americans are becoming increasingly dependant on their gadgets."
And Japan is what? In the dark ages?
I can quit any time I want.
Oh, please. This is just more useless drivel written to sell magazines. Just because something makes your life easier or more fun, doesn't mean everyone is "addicted" because they enjoy using it. Are Americans adicted to tooth brushes, too? 99% of us admit to using them at least daily! OH NO!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Well, I'm on vacation and I'm reading Slashdot.
That about says it all.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
They misspelled 'porn'.
If this is the case, am I addicted to food?
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
If we are talking cliniacal definitions of addiction, i.e. falsely convinced that we cannot live without something and willing to orob/maim/kill/destroy our lives, to obtain it then it depends. I think ther we need to specify the technology in question.
If we are talking a general "growing too soft/dependent upon specific tech" then I would say yes, especially with the internet. I know far too many people who feel the need to have a machine up all the time.
But I think we should really go more basic than that; Electricity.
The standards that we are used to in America, and the rest of the industrialized world (stable, widely available power that rarely if ever goes down) is a) uncommon in the rest of the world, and b) an anomoly in human existence. Few of my peers know how to make a fire or even what to do when the power goes down (hint, the electric can opener will no longer work).
The level of panic surrounding the Y2k bug should have made this clear to anyone. Far too many people (some of them policymakers) panicked at the thought of "global power outages" and, as Katrina showed, far too many were left stranded, unprepared, and unaided when a real disaster struck.
In my opinion "addiction" to mp3 players is just icing on the cake.
in general)I know too many others who *have no clue*
Compared to the insanely cool, science-fiction advanced consumer tech, everything from cell phones to high-speed internet available in Europe, Japan and South Korea, the US is dowdy and backwards. Cingular ain't got squat on DoMoCo, and even a Mielle washer/dryer set is lightyears ahead of the stone-age clunkers Kenmore and Maytag inflict on the American household.
When it comes to technology obsession, the High Street in London and the Akihabara in Tokyo are where it's at.
SoupIsGood Food
i have friend whose dad is a tech junkie. All kinds of gadgets high-speed, workstation laptops etc. One day his son (my friend) got fed with it all, and moed to middle of Mojave desert, where he get no electricity, and certainly no television signal. And he has to drive 5 miles just to get to the closest payfone.
But his daughter, who has doesn't even know what a television is, is very wise for her age (i.e. 7 yrs). Here, I make a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. She may not have all the knowledge, but she is certainly wiser then other kids of her age or even some grown ups.
Would you do something like this? Would you make such a daring move for you children's sake?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
On one hand, yes I'm addicted -- I can barely go a day without at least briefly connecting to the internet, and I don't even want to know how many hours I've logged playing my little gnome mage on World of Warcraft.
However, for many of us, the dependence is more than just a regular old physical/psychological addiction. My marks at school, for example, depend on my being able to get on a computer and access the internet on a regular basis. Many assignments are made available solely through a class website or WebCT, and in two of my classes this past term, every single assignment had to be handed in via the Unix handin command (or the web-based Windows equivalent). Admittedly, I am a computer science student, but there aren't all that many courses in which computers or other forms of technology are completely absent -- even arts students are expected to write essays, and few professors will accept handwritten submissions these days.
I'm addicted to fire, electricity, housing, cooked food and sharpened metal tools.
Or maybe sometimes technology improves your life so you use it.
Addiction is when something makes your life worse, but you keep using it because you are irrationally drawn to it.
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Crudely Drawn Games
By that reasoning, we must also be addicted to taxes, because I know I pay well more than $200/month in income, sales and other taxes. Who do I talk to about giving up taxes?
In other news, Microsoft Windows users are now covered under the Americans with Disabilties Act...
Should be +5 Informative. We all know that the Internet is for porn...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Yeah, I'd say we are addicted to technology. We're a narcissistic people who are obsessed with the things we have created. I don't mean just Americans, I mean humans in general. It's perfecttly normal. The only way it becomes dangerous is when we reach a point where we rely on technology so much we literally could not survive without it.
People can say all they like about technology causing people to slack off, but there is no reason why it shouldn't. Why build things that can make work easier when we can build things that remove the need for work? They say that modern civilization is only possible because we have an abundance of food and can spend our time on other endeavors. We are now experiencing what will turn into an abundance of time. After enough time passes we will eventually reach a level of advancement where we won't need to work anymore, and will have developed safe guards so that we don't have to worry about losing our technology. This, of course, is assuming that we don't blow ourselves up first.
I so love that phrase because it suggests weakness of some sort. As if governments didn't exist to protect and help the people and anyone who thinks otherwize deserves a rude awakening.
In the case of Katrina the very government agencies that we have formed, funded and trained to care for the sick, the elderly, the disposessed of our society, were placed in the hands of self-centered morons whose only interest was in settling the "shirtsleeves up or down" issue. People who could not leave because they were too sick and didn't own cars were being told to "take some cash and drive away". Even now no reliable plan exists to get them home and Karl Rove is directing the reconstruction efforts.
We form governments to protect us as a whole, because individual humans, however many guns they have, are weak and likely to die. To suggest that people who looked to the government that they supported to help them were "weak" or overly dependent" is in my opinion incorrect. Rather wwe should say that the government failed the people. The government failed in its most essential function. What's worse it did so because people let it fail, perhaps even made it fail not because it should not have succeeded.
How about electricity, indoor plumbing, toilets in general. Don't forgent anything to do with farming. Plows, harvesters, trucks to ship food. I would say that if all technology disappeard tomorrow, 99% of the population would die. So, yes we are addicted, as most of the world is.
My vetenarian was complaining today that she used to have a system which used Ricochet, a dumb terminal in her truck, and a Xenix server in her office to access horse medical records remotely. This provided a 38Kb/s connection. Since Ricochet went out of business, that's no longer possible. Data over cellular is less available, slower, harder to set up, and more expensive. Yes, you can set up a VPN, and "web enable" the server, but it's more trouble than it is worth.
Forest tribes are addicted to technology just like americans. They cannot live without bows, arrows, and fire tools.
There you are, staring at me again.
I am typing this comment from my toilet on my laptop... oh and I'm American