Technology: Is it our new culture?

After drastically losing our intramural basketball game on Thursday, I and a few members of the team (and of the organization I am a part of) decided to drown out our sorrows in pancakes at the local IHOP. While waiting on our food, we began talking how our meeting went last week and we discussed the new technique we had adopted in order to keep people involved in the meeting. Our executive board introduced live tweeting the meeting and at the end of the meeting, we would go back through the feed and showcase the tweets on our projector. It was about this time at IHOP when a friend asked me if I have a profile on Twitter, to which I replied I do not. The shock on her face was indescribable, almost to the point where I was about to ask if I had, instead, said something offensive.

Twitter is just one example of how technology has taken over our lives nowadays; it is so ingrained in our lives now that you're almost not human if you haven't embraced the new technology. That night at IHOP I had left my phone at home and, to be perfectly honest, I felt naked without it. Letters have become text messages and video chats are almost as commonplace now as phone calls. There have been times that I have called home only to be told by my parents that they want to "Skype me instead". Phones have now become our lifelines. At any moment one can find the weather across the state, have access to breaking news happening nationally, or even start a conversation with someone who is not even on the same continent with you. Society today has gotten to the point where when you apply for a job, you essentially have two resumes: the printed pieces of paper and your Facebook profile.

There's a wonderful picture floating around on the internet of the presidential family and Vice President Biden all staring into their phones during the second inauguration of Barack Obama (source: www.politicker.com). When I first saw this picture I immediately realized how much our culture has changed in recent years with the explosive growth of the smartphone. Not even the family of the most powerful man of the United States of America can escape the pull of technology. If not even someone like our president cannot put aside his cell phone for a couple of hours, are we, as members of a society that now relies on access to social media sites, expected to rely less on our phones?

I am not saying technology is bad. I am not saying that our technological culture is something we should be ashamed of. There is no need for us to go back to a time where we used a telegraph to tell people how we were doing. But instead, I ask that you look to the future. What kind of technological advances do we have in store for us in the upcoming years? Is that something we can even begin to predict? Is it a bad thing that hangouts with friends have become people sitting around together while on their phones? Technology, and especially the smartphone, has turned this culture around, but is it for the better or the worse?