New technologies: a new paradigm for man?

Technological innovation is very important for progress in all fields of life. Consider, for
example, what the invention of the steam engine meant for transportation, for culture, the
invention of the printing press, and for health the discovery of penicillin. However, the misuse
and abuse of ICTs has negative effects for people of all ages and especially for adolescents.

When it is forgotten that technique is for man (and not man for technique); When
technological resources are no longer seen as a means to an end, a personal dependency is
created that often ends in addiction.

Who are the adolescents most at risk of addiction to ICT? They are “those who demand more
affection, who do not know how to recover from difficulties and who have an attitude of low
self-esteem in the face of life's challenges. This inability to overcome themselves and that need
for recognition from their peers, leads them to seek small successes and satisfactions that
make them forget their difficulties in real life. And so they will submit submissively into the
arms of virtual reality, much more rewarding. " (Castell, P. and Bofarull, I .: Hooked on
screens).

Parents often ask how to prevent the risk of their children acquiring addictive behaviors in the
use of new technologies. I suggest the five measures that I expose below.

1-Limit the places and times for the use of ICT. For example, not using the mobile phone during
the family meal;

2-Monitor internet usage habits; know which social networks children go to and what they use
them for;

3- Suggest that they be very cautious in what they publish on the networks, since anyone can
access that information;

4-Use content filters that prevent access to inappropriate pages;

5-Use alarms that indicate to the user that his time has passed and that he must disconnect.

Behind the abuse of new technologies hides the influence of a postmodern sociocultural
phenomenon: the idolatry of technical power, linked to the myth of technology as a key factor
in indefinite progress.

Contemporary man tends to look for models to imitate both in machines and in people. This
phenomenon is not entirely new: the clock appeared before Newton imagined the world as a
great clock-like mechanism.
Currently, the computer is proposing ideas about man: about his way of learning, thinking and
making decisions. There are computers that function as neural networks, similar to those of
the human brain.

Technology is ceasing to be seen as an instrument to subdue the world; now it is presented as

a paradigm for man, to the point of granting it a saving dimension. Through technology, some
men try to escape an unhappy existence by forgetting themselves, their human condition.

In today's super-technical society, man is constantly exposed to a temptation: to act as

machines do (with the same precision, efficiency and performance). When he succumbs to
that temptation, man becomes a technical animal, an automaton. Technical humanism,
technical pride, is one of the causes of modern atheism.

The technique that tries to overcome human nature only leads to the annihilation of man, to
stop being a subject to transform himself into a useful object.

The true function of the technique is to free man from some material activities that bind him,
to facilitate his spiritual development; it is to put the hand on things to possess them by the
spirit.