(Name)

(Instructors’ name)

(Course)

(Date)

Technology Is Making Communication Easier In Today’s World, But At The Expense Of Personal Contact

Technology has brought about a revolutionary change in the way individuals communicate. As more and more nations progress through the age of information, a number of technological devices like hand phones, television and personal computers have come up and even established themselves a stronghold in the daily lives of many people. As it follows, this has without a doubt influenced the traditional interpersonal interaction and communication in numerous ways that are both positive and negative. This paper, therefore, looks at some of the implications and effects of communication technology on the ways individuals interact with each other.

With the invention of the Internet, the world has been turned into a global village that is highly interconnected. Individuals from different areas all over the world are able to converse easily with each other through such things as twitter and Facebook. Just as well, email has also established itself as a free, fast and convenient method to communicate and has, as a result, replaced the traditional mail. The Internet has made it tremendously handy and simple for people to communicate with each other.

However, the communication ease that technology has brought is not without implications. The Internet, for instance, have extremely changed the way individuals socialize and interact with each other. Although this in a way helps individuals broaden their social circle, people and even couples are unable to interact with each other personally with numerous negative implications. Each individual, for example, is only able to access the information the other is willing to release. This can lead to development of such vices as lying, and can even lead to people to mislead others to have unrealistic expectations of other people. These negative implications are not only affecting personal relationships, but also those in the office. ‘Simple messages which used to be delivered face- to- face are now being sent through impersonal means such as email’ (Nah 1).

Other effects are on the interpersonal relationships children used to form with their friends. Children actually used to talk to their peers. However, those hours, which these children and teens used to have in the neighborhoods personally chatting with their friends, have long vanished. Nevertheless, today, even chatting on e- mail or cell phones, through which teens can chat in paragraphs, is old fashioned. For the current preteens and teenagers, ‘the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cell phone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook and MySpace bulletins’ (Stout 1).

According to a review conducted by an industry trade group, the period between June 2010 and June 2009, subscribers of cell phones sent about 1.8 trillion text messages. This was considered a 33 percent increase from the previous year. This is to mean that most people are spending their days walking around and spending most of their days with their noses deeply buried in their cell phones. As it follows, by doing this, ‘we are tuning put the people who are actually in the same room as us. We seem to have long ago crossed the line as to where doing this stuff is appropriate- people take calls while they are out to dinner, text or check e- mail while on a date, you name it’ (Cafferty 1).

These are clear indications that we all need to take a step back and reassess our dependency on technology for communicating, which is clearly making a large percentage of humanity antisocial.

Works cited

Cafferty, Jack. ‘Technology Replacing Personal Interactions at What Cost?’ Cafferty File. CNN. Web 13 January 2012.

Nah, Wenbin. Technology’s Effect in Interpersonal Communication. Better Interpersonal Communication. Web 13 January 2012.

Stout, Hilary. ‘Antisocial Networking?’ The New York Times. Web. 13 January 2012.