Many people cannot see the harm in overusing technology. They figure that if something was invented to make their lives easier, they should use it without limitation. The underlying problem with this thinking is that it does not consider the health, philosophical or ethical ramifications of technology use. The idea of technology being purely progressive and helpful to our lives is a mislead one. The truth is, overusing technology can have harmful effects on our individual, societal and environmental health.
First of all, overusing technology has a damaging effect on us as individuals, in both a mental and a physical way. We take pleasure in our technology because we feel it creates a path of least resistance for our daily tasks. And as we all know, anything that a person can take pleasure in they can also become addicted to. This is often the case when it comes to our personal technology. Vehicles, cell phones, computers and other devices have all been found to create addictions within people. These addictions can hurt a person’s physical health when they overwhelmingly default to technology to get labor done, and they can hurt a person’s mental health by giving them errant ideas that they are not capable of completing a task without technology.
In a similar way, technology addiction is damaging to our societal consciousness as well. Tasks that people used to complete as part of a team are now completed by some form of technology, such as an assembly line of machines. This makes society dependent on technology and makes our human connections weak. Technology addiction also wreaks havoc on the health of our environment as only a small percentage of technology is considered sustainable. Most of our technology is still developed under the industrialism ethic of “the more production, the better,” making it focused on quantity instead of quality.