Essay on Technology: Rapid Changes in Lifestyles
The important role of technologies in many processes has brought rapid changes to people’s lifestyles. The innovations make people move less and spend only an insignificant amount of time in the fresh air. An average office worker suffers from the so-called ‘sedentary disease’, resulting from the lack of physical activity. Revolutionizing people’s lifestyles, technologies can have both positive and negative effects on the quality of life, and thus the innovations should be used wisely.
The lack of physical activity is one of the major social problems in the twenty first century. The vast majority of population prefers driving to walking. The shift to the use of technologies on global and personal levels makes lives easier but unhealthier at the same time. The lack of physical activity results in the lack of oxygen for the organs and systems of organism. The sedentary lifestyles are becoming a part of culture. Since early years, children start using technologies which can be making them smarter but less active at the same time. Playing computer games instead of football in the open air and browsing websites instead of communicating with their peers, modern children can suffer from excessive weight and lack of physical and social activity. Moreover, the growing popularity of computer technologies resulted in the increase of new kinds of addictions, including Internet and computer game addictions. At the same time, the emissions from technological production and intrusion in the planet’s ecosystems have a negative impact on people’s health and the state of environment in general.
Making people’s lives easier, technologies contribute to the development of consumerism culture. The consumerism culture, also known as the throw-away lifestyle, makes people focus on the materialistic values, willing to consume more and more goods. The Black Friday sales when people are fighting for discount goods in the queues and the queues at the Apple stores when a new iPhone is released are the perfect examples of consumerism lifestyles. Buying a new model of a phone or another dress is not a necessity, but the marketing strategies make people think that they can’t live without it. The accessibility of Internet technologies and the advent of social networks make manipulating the public opinions even easier than before. Sharing their personal information on the web (even if they share it only with friends), users give this information to marketers who will bombard them with their marketing messages as a result. Thus, the development of technologies has negative effects not only on people’s bodies, but even their minds.
Despite all the disadvantages of technological development, this process plays and important role in balancing the ways people affect the planet’s ecosystems. On one hand, technologies are necessary for solving the problems which are the direct consequence of technological progress. For example, substantial amounts of money are spent on research and development of medicine for cancer, which is caused mainly by the polluted environment and unhealthy lifestyles. On the other hand, taking into account the fact that the pollution of the environment is irreversible, it can be stated that further development of technologies is necessary for preventing the collapse of the planet’s ecosystems. Thus, most modern companies make the principles of sustainable development central to their programs. Furthermore, the innovative technologies are needed for the continuous analysis of the current situation and research of effective methods for reducing the negative effects of progress on environment.
Having both positive and negative effects on people’s lives, the technological progress has caused serious changes in lifestyles and planet’s ecosystems. The best solution is to use technologies wisely and pay special attention to the way children use the innovations.