Technology has been a great example of how our nation has developed within the past century, but people have developed a sense of co-dependence with technology in which they rely on it for most attributes of their lives. For some reason, many people believe that without a computer their life would be a disaster, but their reluctance to realize that people lived for centuries without any form of technology leaves them ignorant to life without millions of applications at constant accessbility. With everything now done on computers, there seems to be less interaction with the physical piece of paper, affecting the modern learning style.
Newspapers have struggled within the past couple years because of the increased amount of articles that are now read online. Many employees have been cut from their jobs on the newspaper staff, adding to the already increasing unemployment rate, just because readers do not get the paper delivered to the end of their driveway nearly as often as in past times. There’s no more sitting on the couch and reading the newspaper while sipping coffee— the most cliche picture of a dad in the morning. Also, the sharing of articles has been deprived, because rather than cutting out articles and handing them to someone to read, links are just electronically sent with a little message that says,”read this.” Not being given a physical copy of the article makes searching for it online a hassle.
Students and faculty at Walpole High School have recently come down with a sickness that has them relying heavily on computers for all aspects of learning. The students’ and facultys’ co-dependence with computers includes the use of computers to organize their information, leaving people with a personal attachment to their computer rather than the project they are working on. At WHS, the scheduling for the next year’s courses has recently been switched to online forms. In 2009, the school gave each student a sheet of paper for each of their teachers to sign off on their recommendation for each student’s classes. This year, however, the teachers fill out the recommendations online. Granted most of the teachers talk about their suggestions before posting them, the students are partially blinded by their full schedule. Having the actual sheet of paper with the recommendations on it allows the student to view their potential class as a whole schedule and makes the process as a whole a lot less confusing.
Inconveniently, applications for programs in school, such as the National Honor Society, require the application to be completed online. When given instructions to find the application, the nominees have to follow multiple steps just to access the application. The nominees are then required to fill out the form online, which makes it more difficult and more time occupying to complete. Agreeing junior Rebecca Goula says, “I’d much rather have just printed it all out and filled it in by hand.” Similar to the club’s application are college applications, which also require many links students have to follow just to access the application. Junior Jenny Landon talks about the overwhelming college process as she says, “After finally finding the site you have been looking for, you then have to try out all of your different passwords and logins just to access the site.” Computers have brought our society to a whole new level, but the unnecessary amount of confusion that has come along with the new development is what draws away from the effectiveness and simplicity of a hand-written application.
Sending letters through the mail has always seemed more personal to the recipient because it shows that more thought, time, and a little money for the stamp, were put into the letter. Some people may refute this idea because they believe, “It’s the thought that counts.” But, an email that only takes 5 minutes to write for a friend, has a lot less effort put into it. Christmas cards have now been added to the many messages sent electronically, which rather than writing out a bunch of addresses on envelopes, only requires a little time to type out email addresses. The sentimentality of these letters has greatly decreased since generic messages can be sent to hundreds of people at once, with the hackneyed style of Times New Roman in size 12 font. A handwritten note adds a personal touch that keeps a stronger connection with the people that one can only write to, because they live to far away to see on the regular. It is not that hard to write a short message to each family member and friend at the bottom of a card once a year. Rather than receiving an ordinary email mixed in with the other 100 emails a person receives daily, receiving a card with a hand-written note on it has a subliminal message of the writer’s care for the person they are writing to. With just a little more effort put into each letter with these messages, the importance and sincerity of the letter to each receipient increases by a substantial amount.
Computers can definitely be a helpful tool for school work: typing up documents, researching facts, and making art projects. But, most of these activities can also be done at the library, or just with a pen and a piece of paper. The sincerity and effort put into hand-written projects has a way of adding a personal twist to the project. And, rather than sitting and completing the assignment at your desk, a common teenager is easily distracted by the many popular social networking sites while they try to complete their work on the computer. Overuse and reliance on one object in a person’s house can lead them to a dependency issue that can easily be avoided by picking up a pen and writing down some of the important documents that are saved on the computer. Everyone should unglue their eyes from the computer screen and take an occasional break to write their long lost friend a letter, read a hard-copy of a newspaper, or just for the sake of saying one’s life does not depend totally on a piece of technology.
