Technology and its minions: The enthralling and dangerous new vice
How many times have you felt absolutely naked and stranded when you left your hand phone at home, being unable to communicate with your friends and inform them about your whereabouts or change of plans? How many depressing and agonizing instances have we experienced for ourselves when we found our computer has crashed because of a small but potent virus, or when our local internet service provider conveniently cuts off our internet connection? In a larger sense, businesses are intricately involved as well. A study reports that a company that experiences a computer outage lasting for more than 10 days will never fully recover financially and that 50 percent of companies suffering such a predicament will be out of business within 5 years. Anyhow, The pain of such incidents are indeed traumatizing as they are common especially in the local context; research shows 74% of households in Singapore own a computer (laptop or desktop) and out of that 74%, 60% have access to the Internet.
The advent of technology has indeed galvanized the world into a smaller entity, a mere mouse-click takes users to locations far away and our friends are always readily available to talk to; simply put the physical boundaries of time and space have melted away with the meteoric rise of the Internet since it was first put into notion in 1964. Rightly so, the positives are there for obvious consideration. Information flow has never been so readily available; as such the education children receive in this century is no longer confined to the four walls of a classroom. If a child is unable to attend a lesson, the lesson would be broadcasted via webcam, or self automated slides and lesson plans with voiceovers done can be posted. In universities across the world this practice is a common and accepted one; undergraduates constantly log on to portals to download information and assignment plans posted up by their teachers. E-lectures are available as well for the ease of students to learn, and it solves the problem of a lack of seats in crowded lecture theaters. Self-help has never been so easy and readily available as well, streaming video providers like Youtube and Metacafe enables user uploaded videos that can promote better knowledge flow. Cooking and music lessons for example are a common search topic, all in all contributing to the ease of the individual. However with such positive impacts there are the negatives to consider as well.
The echoes opining the vice like grip of the Internet have been around since the commercialization in the 1990s. Undeniably the addiction is prevalent, and a worrying aspect of it would be the availability of pornography online. 12% of the total number of websites on the Internet are pornography sites, and with it, every second there are 28,258 Net users who are viewing pornography. This worrying number is perhaps even more worrying when huge bulks of viewers are below the legal age of viewing such explicit material. Even with the various confirmations on several pornography websites, a simple and dishonest selection of age would easily bypass this dispensable check. The result of online pornography addiction has shown a relationship with sex crime rates. A review of controlled studies has found that extensive, extremely prolonged viewing of the type of pornographic material commonly sold at adult bookstores was positively correlated with leniency in the sentencing of a person convicted of rape in a mock trial setting, decreased satisfaction of participants with their sex lives and partners, and an increased self-reported willingness to commit rape or other forced sexual acts. That said, internet social addiction is another problem rising. With the emergence of online social network services such as Friendster, MySpace and most notably Facebook, the social culture online has been a playing a big and vital role in today’s society.
Considering the ease of interaction, individuals may find it easier to interact behind a computer screen, leading to overt lack of face to face interaction skills. The dependence of such a medium can lead to alienation as well, as there is a sense of emotional isolation and in being deeply intertwined in an online persona, the true sense of an identity is lost.
