Artifact 2 blog

Our lives in this day and age are very much about being connected with our mobile devices or our computers as much as possible.  It seems like every person in the world today has to have their phone with them at all times because they are afraid that they might miss something important.  When a message pops up on your phone it is thought of as essential to stop whatever you are doing at that time and respond to it.  William Powers is correct that it would help a lot of us out now days if we would just put our technology away for a while and just get in touch with the real world.  With us always having our technology on hand and ready to use that is probably half of what we think about everyday of our lives.  If its not us thinking to check what new message or update we could be recieving on our phone then we are thinking about our email or what new gossip is going on on facebook right now.  Since we constantly worry about this technology everyday we miss out on a lot of aspects of life that people use to enjoy before all of this technology was commonplace.  Back then people use to enjoy others company or they would take in the scenery around them when they were outside instead of like now days when they will be looking down at their phone the whole time when they go somewhere.  He talks about in the video about how in the days of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James that they also had times that they were disconnected.  But that was not about being technology, that was about being disconnected from deep thinking.  He also talked about the Romans and the Greeks and William Shakespeare.  They were reading and thinking about new ideas the whole time and they thought that the new books that came out was completely new and they could not keep up with it just like it is hard for us to keep up with technology today.  So it seems to me like no matter what age we are in that there is always something new that is just really hard for us to grasp.  Everybody likes doing it because it is something new but people throughout every age always wonder if peope are getting to caught up with the new technology and not taking in the simple things in life.  I think that no matter how little or how much technology that we have that we will still always think that we need to be disconnected from it for a while because no matter how much new technology that we have we will want to use it to try to fit in with the rest of society.  It is almost impossible to avoid using the new technology that is out but it is possible to take a break from it for a while to take in life.  That is what William Powers is trying to convey in his book and I agree because I think it is important to spend time with family and take in the things around you that you miss out on when you are constantly tapped into your different pieces of technology.  He talks about how his family would just turn off their computers for a couple days a week and I think that is a good idea that really makes you realize how much we depend on technology as a crutch even though it is not needed at all.