My Relationship With Technology

 My relationship with technology is up and down like most people's. Most of the time it is very useful, but it can be a big distraction often. We live in such a technology-dependent society that it can be nearly impossible to not spend too much time on devices. My daily screen time just last week was a little over five hours a day and that's just my phone. If I add in playing video games, watching basketball, and doing work on my laptop it could easily be close to ten hours a day. 

I do not have TikTok but I spend well over an hour a day on Instagram scrolling and wasting my time. It can be useful when I see basketball or football updates I'm interested in but overall I spend far too much time scrolling and that is just one way technology can be a large distraction. Another way is spending too much time playing video games because it's one of my go-to ways of unwinding after a long day. 

Over winter break I aim to drastically reduce my screen time by limiting my scrolling and video game time by spending more of my time reading, working out, and playing basketball. Hopefully reducing my screen time and focusing on my health over the break will help me reset in between semesters and make me better prepared for my classes. 

I have always tried to approach life with realistic expectations which is why I do not pay much attention to anything others do on social media. It doesn't affect me or matter to me and I avoid comparing my life and instead focus on what I can control to make my own life better. This makes my digital footprint fairly small because I almost never post anything and do not follow many people. I'm sure that hundreds of different companies have data on me despite that due to simply putting my email or phone number into websites that I've used. The only thing in my digital footprint I wish I could delete is my basketball recruiting profile on NCSA  because I hate the picture in the profile and I also never had a chance to play basketball at the collegiate level. 

Considering the two very different videos the first about thriving technology in the future and the second about technology turning us into mindless zombies both have some truth to them. In the 1960s video about the future they got a lot of stuff right and certainly highlighted many benefits of modern technology, but what they didn't anticipate was that everyone would be carrying supercomputers in their pockets capable of everything and causing people to be chronically online, and sometimes even absent from life. The second video addresses this taking it to the extreme that all people are mindless drones never getting off of their phones and while it's obviously a hyperbole it is not so far off reality indicating the direction we are headed towards. 

In conclusion, I am going to make an effort to reduce my own screen time and improve my health. I think being chronically online is not good for anyone, but it becomes so much easier during the winter months to overuse screens and avoid going outside.