Technology Advances - The Darker Side

In these days of the Information Age, life moves at breakneck speed. Email and mobile phone enables us to receive news almost immediately. It also enables us to send news almost immediately. Although this is good in a sense, there is also a darker side to it.

Let's take the ever-present mobile phone for instance. Since its inception, this device has gone through numerous changes and has become more and more powerful. From just a device transmitting voice over a wireless channel, it can now take and send pictures and videos, surf the web and receive emails.

These advances, while having their uses, are also open to abuses. The phone cam now is now ever present. Even in places where you think that you have your privacy, e.g. in toilets and changing rooms etc. There's always a danger someone is there discreetly pointing the device at you and recording your most embarassing or private moments. We've all seen the results, I trust - mostly from e-mails sent by our contacts or through some public links in some forums or such.

Imagine if you get such a mail and when you click on the link you find to your horror that you are actually looking at a picture of a footage of yourself in one of your most embarassing moments. I do not need to stress that some of the pictures and footage borders on being illegal and some are downright so. At the very least it is an invasion into our privacy.

Ironically, technology that purportedly keeps us more connected has an effect that keeps us more detached from one another. Take the use of the various instant messaging programs available. Let's not forget those social websites also. We can 'appear' to be always online and we can view messages left for us at our leisure. So much so that what we fail to notice it keeps us tied to our terminals. We spent more and more time sitting at our terminals and less and less time interacting face to face. Is it any wonder why some of the youngsters today seem to lack social skills?

I don't know. It is just me that sense that the more technology advances, the more we lose that personal touch? Are the days when friends make time to meet up at some 'mamak' stall to just chat and catch up with the latest happenings in their lives heading for extinction? I just hope that we don't all one day become 'cold' like the technology that we use. That we at least retain that warmth of human to human interaction and the decency to respect other people's dignity. We must all remember that for all the wonders that technology can bestow, they are just tools for our use. We are defined by our actions and should be responsible for them. Although we can easily remain anonymous behind a wall of technological advances, let it not take the best of our humanity away and leave us with just the bad. Let us not forget that behind every userID there is a human with real feelings. We should all 'connect' on a more personal level and not on just a technological level.