Is Technology Our Friend?

“Smartphone: Closer to The Distant, Distancing The Near Ones”

By: Claudia Rosari Dewi, S.Psi

Technology is a very important word for nowadays human life. Why it becomes realy important? Because, nowadays everything happen almost all of it has the technological factors involved in it. Almost 100% of our daily activities are done with the help of technology. Start from our work, our everyday basic needs, and personal relationships between one another, occurs because it is connected with technology. The technology can be a mobile phone, computer or laptop, various gadgets or other good electronics. Technology always developt from time to time and going to grow rapidly. Technology always growing, moving forward and never going backward. Technology create by human. The human brain works naturally creating lot of incredible ideas that aim to further facilitate human needs. It’s means that technology can increase human life, human can be more productive, efective, and more happy to do their work. Basically the nature of technology is to help human life. Technology continues to grow along with the development of people in this world.

A simple example of technology is smartphone. These small item used for communication and the other benefit is for entertain our self. All company of brands and types of smartphones compete to provide comfort and fun for people less than half a year they always make and launch new products. Smartphones not only as a communication tool but also as a tool that provides a variety of interesting features that aim to entertain and show the existence of every people. These features can we call as social media applications which is very familiar in the world. For example, Instagram, Facebook, Whatapp, Line, Youtube, Telegram, etc. Among young people today, social media as a derivative of technological advances lately is an unavoidable phenomenon. The phenomenon that arises is closer the distant and distancing the near ones . The image below represents that phenomenon :

What's in your mind when you see that picture? For the author, this picture represents a conclusion that technology is the enemy, not our friend anymore. When we’ve quality time with the family, it becomes number second because of the gadget is make those people feeling more enjoy. People closest, no longer close, because their friends or something that is seen in the virtual world through the gadget is much closer than those who sit next to them. The family room should be a place for each other to talk with each other, releasing the longing and to share the life stories between family members, but what happens is the opposite, the technology in their grasp that is the focus of attention; they can be busy chating through the application on the smartphone, or they enjoy to play games online, they have to reply to email clients or colleagues, they like to download movies or songs, and they enjoy to update their social media, each other like not know each other and the room like no one there. Am I wrong to say this is irony? Each other doesnt’t greet each other in the right and in the left, not say hello and give a touch to each other, they didn’t relize that the real people beside him is the real relationship, his father, mother, son, wife or husband. They are more enjoy looking down, towards their smartphone or gadget. If we have this experience, don’t blame others or the circumstances because our relationship becomes break with the people closest to us, for example; become often noisy, miss comunication, miss understanding, etc. The technology that we use in the form of martphones is very interesting and very convenient for us to use it, as if the whole world in the grip, we can have many things that we want, we feel satisfy use the social media in the virtual world than to socialize in real life. If our self become like this, technology is no longer our friend for us. Technological advancements in smartphones are able to break down our close relationships with other people in the real world, but can make a good connection to other people that have distant eventhough it’s an unknown people. It‘s not true because as if we are enslaved by cyberspace, we become addicted and dependent with our smartphones.

Let's think more wisely to use technology in the form smartphones that we have. Smartphones become more useful when we can get people closer to us closer and approach those who are far away from us. Everything back to you respectively, whether the technology you use now can be regarded as your friend? Or even become your enemy?