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Today's new technology greatly improves our communications systems. With cell phones, the Internet, beepers, pagers, and various online services, reaching out to your fellow neighbor is easier than ever, not to mention trendier. ("What color cell phone do you have? Mine is purple.") But despite all the perks, all these new ways of communicating can have negative aspects.
The Internet is a major part of people's lives. Besides, who can resist all those sites just waiting to be explored? All that e-mail waiting to be read? Who hasn't stayed up till midnight -or even later- surfing the Internet, to wake up the next morning with red puffy eyes and a warm, satisfactory feeling in your gut? The Internet is a huge distraction in our lives, promoting lack of concentration and many inefficiently spent work hours.
Also with the Internet come message boards, Cliff's notes you can download, and a lot of essays to derive "inspiration" from. This kind of environment promotes cheating, and while I won't argue on the subject of whether cheating is morally wrong, the teachers certainly think so, and they're the ones grading you. Many a student has been lead astray by the Internet, and many have been caught with unfavorable consequences.
"There is help for you out there." Sound like a quote from Alcoholics Anonymous? Nope, it's a quote from a brochure for helping Internet addicts. Internet addicts?!? Yes, it is a sad sad day when people would rather spend time in front of a big luminescent screen talking to people they don't even know and going online for eight hours at a time, rather than enjoying the non virtual aspects of life. As ludicrous as it seems, people are addicted to the Internet and the number is growing steadily every day.
There is another form of communications with equally negative effects. Allow me to introduce to you: (evil ominous music) the Cell Phone. The cell phone is the worst invention ever thought up. While most forms of communications are supposed to make your life easier, cell phones actually make it harder. Sure you can call anyone at anytime, but so can everyone else. That means your mother, father, that annoying guy or girl in your English class, your boss, the insurance company coming to ask for more payments on that car you totaled last week… and the list goes on and on. This causes you to work more and harder. When you could be lying on the beach with no distractions at all, you are lying on the beach, arguing with your parents whether to come home now or come home later. And one of the most annoying things is sitting on a train trying to take a much needed nap when the person next to you is talking faster and louder than the train, on a cell phone.
Lastly, cell phones cause fatalities. How many car crashes have been caused by an innocent chat on a cell phone while driving on the highway? Let's just say many. Even though cell phones are convenient, they cause people to use them anytime and anyplace, when they should be concentrating on something more immediately important.
The new forms of communications are convenient, but they have their negative sides. While I am not saying people should return to the Dark Ages and use couriers to carry their messages, I don't think communications should be touted as the end to all our communications problems. People will continue to invent their communications technologies, and there will be down sides to these new inventions. Until the day we use mental telepathy to communicate with each other, there will be problems. And even mental telepathy has its glitches.
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