The Things You Own Will End Up Owning You

Last week, my Spanish teacher was trying to access a video on YouTube to show our class. We demanded that she make it full screen, but she soon pressed the wrong button and another video began to play. She apologized profusely, as the class erupted in groans of impatience at the prolonged process of playing the video. It was then that I realized just how prominent of a disconnect there is between the past generations and the children of today regarding technology.

I was talking to my friend about this topic and she brought up the fact that in her American Studies class, which is obviously not as awesome as ours, they discussed that our generation, as in, the teenagers today, are the last to fully understand what it was like when technology was not at its full capacity. Even the kids I babysit, who are seven and nine years old, can easily navigate the iPad and iPhone and beg to use mine to play games on when I'm with them. What ever happened to board games and playing outside? It's weird to think that at one point, we didn't even have phones, and when I was growing up, all people had were flip phones whose only function was to call and text (if you were patient enough to press the numbers multiple times just to get one letter). There were no such things as apps. But the children growing up today never experienced life without technology; and this is a detriment to their growth as human beings. 

I read this article today about technology, and the author, Jeff Sorensen, connected a quote from Fight Club's Tyler Durden to modern day technology. In the movie, Durden stated, "The things you own will end up owning you." In a way, this is exactly how our electronic devices are today. We possess these deadly objects that could cause us to lose our distraction, proving to be a hazard on the roads, and create a huge method of procrastination. It seems that nothing else matters when you have your phone in your hands, absolutely blurring out the world around you. Sorensen brought up a blackout that occurred in 2003, claiming that after going three days without power, "People were actually reading books and talking like human beings again. They started learning how to live without the training wheels of technology" (Huffington Post). It's interesting to see how different people act in everyday situations when technology is inaccessible, and Sorensen proves a point when he warns his readers to avoid being "owned" by their cellphones, as they have the potential to take over our lives.