When I was a child, I used to play games on paper with my siblings. I used to create my own version of Snake and ladder or a dice-adventure game where you will have health and be faced against many kinds of obstacle that can reduce your health before you cross the finish line. But now, since we all have our own gadget now, my sisters prefer to search for games on Google Playstore or beating a new high score in Don’t Tap the White Tile. Actually I am no different than the other; I have my own stuff to do in gadget as well – this kind of story may sounds like I’m trying to tell you that those gadgets are making you antisocial and have less imagination, but I’m not. Without gadget, my sister would never be often to look up for Rubik solving tutorial videos on YouTube that make her possible to build her way up to reach 17 second solving time. Without gadget, I would never be able to share my thoughts about ideas with my close friends that move far from me because they study abroad. Many people around spreading words about how bad this technology but my take on this that gadget is not the one to blame. The gadget is not the problem but is viewed to be the culprit by most people because of three reasons – people oversells the disadvantage, people just focus on a small part and forget the big picture, and people like to compare.
Firstly, people often oversell part of which they disagree and spread their words for others, forgetting the other side that might have big part too, which is the advantage. A video demoting the gadget that is titled “Look up” shows that a man has missed a chance to married to a girl to live a happy life and has ended up living up miserably alone just because he decided to look up to his gadget for an aid of map application instead of asking a girl that just passed by him. Meanwhile, there is an article talking about this video telling the reader that the author can marry a girl and live happily because he chose to spend time on gadget reading emails because he has to live apart from the girl since he met for the first time instead spend more time with other people in the real world. This shows us that one story can’t apply to just everyone, but people decided to see it the other way and just generalize things as bad or good. People can use gadgets for good or use it for bad, but it is not the gadget’s fault if people use it for bad.
Secondly, people tend to focus on a small part rather than looking up for the big picture. Many people complain that they often find people always stare at their gadget and ignore the surroundings. People that complaining things like that don’t bother to think that people might be communicating someone they love, one might be thinking about an idea for an essay for his final task in their school, or a man could be in a deep sorrow, but he can’t just ask a stranger around for comfort. Additionally, I personally often find a group of people uses gadget so they can work projects together in a more effective way or competing on a multiplayer game together. Seeing a few person overuse gadget doesn’t everyone else does the same. It is just how people view its usage that makes it bad, not the gadget’s fault.
Thirdly, people often to compare one thing to another. People that lived since the 70’s often found saying that people nowadays talk less to each other and prefer using a gadget instead. However, there is a study showing that in the last decade, the number of human interactions is more than we’ve ever had because the technology allows this to happen. People should realize that the world is never meant to stay the same. Social interactions do change but don’t necessarily change to worse. The phenomenon where people talk less to surrounding doesn’t exclusive to this age. In the old times, people tend to read newspaper in the train, just like us today with smartphones.
People should, however, not completely label gadget as a bad thing even though they never saw people do better things with it. Gadgets are invented for a greater good, but some portion of people in the society just tend do use it wrongly and collectively create an impression that gadgets are making a bad influence to human’s society structure. It is needed to be realized that gadgets offer different ways to communicate with other which are more limitless than the previous one and it is not surprising that this makes a big change in how we communicate with each other. If something changes, it could be bad and it could be good and we, as the one who play the roles here, are the ones who decide to where this change leads. So what is needed to be done is to change ourselves as a being who utilize this technology to its fullest rather than being enslaved by it.
To conclude, Gadget is not the problem but the people keeps blaming it to be. People should reflect on themselves and accept that gadget has also played some parts in their life too. Gadgets are just the tools that we can use and just like any other tools that have been invented, we can decide to use it or not, and when we use it, it is up to use to use it for bad or for good.
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