"An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness"

Summary
This article by Tara Parker-Pope describes the impact that technology has had on our everyday lives. She brings attention to the fact that we have become so dependent upon technology that many people have become forgetful, impatient, self-absorbed, and entirely incapable of functioning without it. She includes information about studies that have been conducted at various colleges throughout the country in which results showed that a portion of college students can actually be considered "addicted" to technology in the way that people are addicted to gambling.

Reflection
The article truly shows how much technology has impacted our lives in a negative way over the last few decades. It’s true that the world is completely dependent upon the everyday use of things such as the internet, e-mail, and cell phones. In one of the studies that were discussed in the article, students were asked to not use any form of technology for an entire day. One of the students who was interviewed at the end said that their life was miserable for that twenty-four hour period because they felt secluded not being able to contact others via either the internet or their cell phone. The fact that we have become so dependent on virtual communication as opposed to face to face communication has definitely altered the way in which we are able to form and maintain our relationships with others. One of the main points of the article was that the high-speed communication and instant retrieval of information that is made available to us through the use of technology has made us completely forgetful and impatient. We have become so attached to the ease of getting things done instantly through the internet, and I don’t believe that problem is going to be solved any time soon because the world of technology is only going to grow from here.

Tie in with Carr
Both this article and the article by Carr reflect upon the negative impact of technology on our everyday lives. While it is true that technology makes our lives a great deal easier and has improved us as a society, it is also true that it has detrimentally affected our ability to grow as intellectuals at times. Carr discusses in his article how the internet has made him almost incapable of sitting down and reading a full book or even ready a lengthy article in a magazine or newspaper. This concept seems almost ridiculous to fathom when Carr himself is an author and journalist. But his reasoning for why he cannot focus on something for a long period of time makes sense: we are bombarded with an overload of information at the click of the mouse at all times when we are online. There are advertisements all over, there are links upon links upon links of related information at the bottom of every webpage, and as Parker-Pope discusses in her article, there is an endless hole of storage on the computer that takes up our ability to replace things of our past with things of our future. Both of the articles depict the effects that internet use has had on us: our inability to focus, our impatience when things are not able to be done immediately, and they way in which we have become so completely absorbed in the cyberworld that at times, it is almost as if we have forgotten who we are as individuals.