Does new technology make us anti-social?

I personally think technology has let us take the easy way out. For example emailing a teacher is much easier then going to visit them during office hours and texting is much easier then actually calling someone and talking to them on the phone. There is not nearly as much personal confrontation as there used to be say 10 years ago because there are so many ways to get around it.

Another example is Walkman, MP3 player or whatever device that people use to listen to music. What the Walkman and MP3 player did was to create a personal zone around the individual in a public space. It was more anti-social than chewing gum, more provocative than wearing mascara to tutorials. Think about it. We don’t share music by hanging out and listening to records anymore; we just swap music files on a pendrive or MP3.

The Walkman allowed us to tune out the surroundings we didn’t like. Great for long commutes or jogging. But think where it’s got us. Pocket sized devices we wear like shields to protect us from interacting with the strange, the new, the different, the unexpected. Earphones that block out all but the sound of the familiar and make us think we’re in a movie.

We’re not. We’re in the here and now, with people and things, and sights and smells that we may never experience because we’re too absorbed by our personal devices. Life’s there to be taken personally, but not from behind a device.

But, if we think again, sometimes technology will improve social life. One one side you have the people who spend all of their time on their computers playing alone, and on the other you have the people playing with each other. There's also a ton of technology that I would say improves social habits. Things like cell phones and webcams make it easier to talk to people that you may not otherwise get the chance to talk to.

However new technology is not all that bad and it actually has several pros. Social media activities have given people the opportunity to have discussion networks with people from different backgrounds. The study also said internet and cell phone users are as likely as anyone else to visit with their neighbors in person and belong to local organizations.

So apparently technology really doesn’t have a negative affect on people in today’s world. However if anything I am convinced people today do not have as good of face-to-face people skills one may have had 10 years ago due to texting and emailing.