Technology Isolates People Research Paper

Today, technology in the form of social media and the Internet is a large part of everyday life for most people. According to Internet Live Stats, a website created to show data on the amount of people who use the Internet and the amount of people who are using the Internet at any time, there is 3,424,971,237 Internet users in 2016, that is exactly 46.1% of the entire world population. So, are all of these people online being connected or isolated? Many people would say that technology isolates people by allowing people to hardly leave their home and still be able to know about everything going on in the world. However, this is not true. Technology, in the form of social media, connects people when they otherwise would not be able to interact

One popular example of this is the family gathering in which the "unsocial teenager" is on their smart phone interacting with people online instead of with those around them. This is an undeniable effect that technology has had on society. Ethan Ris writes, "The 20th century witnessed incredible technological advances, but most of them served to isolate us from each other. The automobile was a perfectly self-contained mode of transportation, while radio and TV allowed us to hear music and witness history without leaving our homes. Telephones allowed us to communicate, but only with the one person we chose at any given time" (1). In other words, with every new form of technology there is also a new way for people to interact with others less. However, this is not the only effect of new technology. Before the automobile, it was very difficult for people to meet up with others who lived far away from them. It may be a "self-contained mode of transportation", but it also is a way for people to connect over long distances in person. Although radio and TV do not require the person to leave their home, they carry information that would be very hard to obtain without them. Finally, the telephone. Without the telephone, how would one be able to connect with another person over a long distance quickly? Many people choose to see how technology isolates people, when really it

Joseph Dickerson is a user experience professional and UX Lead for Microsoft, so he is well acquainted with technology. He writes, "The social networks and the “cloud” has broken down barriers and opened up opportunities that we would not have had otherwise" (1). Without the help of social media, how would one meet someone in another part of the world that they might never visit? Even if they do go to that place, what are the odds they will meet that person and get to know them? Social media solves this problem and it does it very well, Dickerson is a living example of this. He was a large fan of the TV show "Twin Peaks" and, through the power of social media, he was able to meet the co-creator of the show, Mark Frost. Dickerson "responded to one of his tweets, [they] started a conversation, and now [they] are “talking” almost every day" (1). Without social media, this never would have happened. Social media connects people by providing people with opportunities to meet others that they never would otherwise. In conclusion, technology both isolates and connects people. It isolates people by causing its users to become less social. It also removes the necessity to leave the home to communicate with others or obtain information. Technology connects people who know each other through social