Heidi Fallon

Op-Ed
4 May 2020
Is Technology and Social Media Causing Us to Distance Ourselves?

Have we come to the point where people are so caught up in what is being posted online that
they can’t even have a face-to-face conversation? The rapid growth of technology has improved
so many aspects of our lives. Technology is supposed to keep us more in touch with others, but
because we are texting or snapchatting when it comes to actually voicing the words some have
trouble.

Our world is so caught up in the new, the perfect. We have to have the perfect life and that’s
what people portray on their social media. No one shows the bad, because that’s not what they
want people to think of them.

For example, college study abroad trips. Students will post themselves in front of the Eiffel
Tower, the London Eye, but if they get pick pocketed in Barcelona do they post that? Pictures
get edited so that people look their best, the number of likes a picture gets matters, and the
number of followers a person has decides how good their profile is. But how many of those
followers do you really know? How many have you had a conversation with?

The obsession of showing everyone the moments in your life has taken over our mind that we
can’t even live in the moment. Because we have access to photo and video on our smartphones
people don’t want to miss a moment, memories are important. But we are watching our life
through a phone screen.

Companies like Google and Facebook have taken over our browsers by watching what websites
we visit and what we click on. They then take that information and advertise what we visited on
our social media and other websites. There is no privacy on the internet. Any account
information is being shared in some way and kept in a server.

As technology evolves will our habits get worse or will we change and improve? Recently we
have been noticing the invasion of privacy, but we haven’t been able to do anything about it.
These companies already have our information. The million-dollar question is are people okay
with this information being shared? Or are they willing to change these habits and privacy
setting?