Today's Digital Soul Siphon:
Six ways Technology is Ruining your Life
Bonedog - No. 18

Technological globalization is increasing at an exponential rate. In 50 years, capacitors will have shrunk to sub-atomic sizes whilst in the same time frame, obesity will approach the 60th percentile. Many will forget how it felt to truly take a vacation and will joke about how we could live without contemporary technology. A Society of first world nations will descend into a virtual cesspool of the likes that has never been seen before. The following are six reasons to avoid technology whenever possible.

Spelling and Grammar -
While many computer users have praised spell check as an invaluable resource for writing and editing anything from word documents to emails, I feel that many people are not realizing spellchecker’s possible detrimental effects. I have always been a poor speller in grade school. Unable to innately understand the phonetics of many words, my essays were often plagued with misspellings. Then enter Microsoft Word into my life.

Microsoft Word has acted as a crutch, a temporary solution to a permanent impediment, for thousands of poor spellers like me. Why bother taking the effort to learn how to properly spell words if spell check will correct them for me? While this has resulted in flawlessly spelled essays it has also had disastrous effects on my non-digital writing. When writing unaided by spell check I would assess my writing competence to be on par with that of an 8th grader.

It isn’t only poor spellers like me that are hurt by spell check, grammar check and automatic thesaurus replacement. These tools, when used without further proofreading, often breed poor work ethic, decreased vocabulary and incorrect grammar. Even most search engines will automatically correct a user’s misspellings. Spellcheck can also commonly auto correct a word to the wrong word subtly. Example: in my thesis paper colcks (ment to be clocks) was auto corrected to cocks. Technology is great stuff.

Social Media -

Social media networks have also put much less emphasis on physical communication increasing the rate of social anxiety in teenagers. Quite a bit of people have become more timid when it comes to communicating with their peers. Where associates would have spoken to each other in person they are now talking over the phone. Conversations that were traditionally spoken over the phone are now texted. This hyposensitivity to physical contact is breeding a whole culutre of introverted uncertain pussies.

Whether it be dumping a girlfriend over AIM, telling their best friends you fucked his sister via the phone or divorcing their wife with an email, it seems some men have yet to have their scrotums fully descend. It’s all a bunch of impersonal, spineless bullshit. People have become so accustom to ubiquitous technology that they are anxious without their digital teddy bears.

Desensitizing –
It cannot be denied; Pornography is a driving force of technological multimedia innovation. It's a well understood idea that porn built the internet; credit card transactions, protected content, video streaming are all web features which surfaced first in the context of porn web sites. Even 3-D film is currently being heavily researched by Vivid, a top level porn company. Unless you live in a third world country, there is a good chance that at least 90 percent of the graphic images you’ve been exposed to in your life were viewed somewhere online (WARNING: example of gore ). Though some would argue that videogames have already exposed children to a unhealthy amount of graphic imagery, at least video games have a rating system that will block out the most extreme gore. The internet has no such censorship and virtually all its gore is non-fiction, adding to the potential traumatic value.

What effects does desensitizing content have on children? Videos like “2 girls 1 cup” are relatively benign, perhaps at their worse goading some acid from your stomach onto the floor. Violent videos have a much high potential for traumatization. For example, a 12 year old viewing a video of Hamas cutting off a British Soldiers head with a blunt knife or a man being stabbed in the stomach with a screwdriver. Videos of this caliber and content are easily capable of crafting subconscious reoccurring nightmares .

Physical Health –
Let’s face it, a sedentary lifestyle is unhealthy. How natural would it have been for a caveman to sit down on a rock and stare at a cave wall for five hours a day? Stagnant physical activity can lead or contribute to a vast array of physical maladies including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression and hemorrhoids. A recent study has shown that following a sedentary lifestyle is more dangerous for your health than smoking.

“20% of all deaths of people 35 and older were attributed to a lack of physical activity (cancer, respiratory ailments, heart disease). That's more deaths than can be attributed to smoking…physical activity is absolutely critical for the health of the human body. In fact, it's fair to say that the human body was designed to be used.”

Your body is not like your car, bike, prostitute. The more you use it the healthier it will become. Unfortunately there is also a pretty direct correlation between poor eating habits and computer use. Video games like World of Warcraft and Couter Strike can metally chain users to the computer for hours on end. So get out of your mother’s basement every week or so to absorb some UV light and walk around. Or for you normal people reading this, go out for a five minute walk every day and stay away from junk food, it will make you feel better, trust me.

Fiscal Safety –
Your digital fingerprint may be bigger than you think it is. Any time you use your full name online it is most likely being recorded by hundreds of search engines and can be found easily with a simple search query. While these actions may initially expose you little risk, as you post more information online it culminates making it easier from a thief to steal your identity. Facebook and Myspace are notorious for providing complete indexes of personal information that are extremely useful to thieves including date of birth, phone numbers, addresses and pictures. Malicious worm programs crawl social networking sites silently creating vast databases of sensitive information.

If added risk of identity theft isn’t enough consider the possible negative political ramifications of using the internet. There have been numerous cases of employees being terminated for what they, say off the clock, via blogs and forums. Employers have also been known to screen potential workers social networking pages to look for possible negative character traits (aka alcohol abuse, drug use and swearing/profanity). Even if a person thinks they are intelligent enough to avoid the possible political pitfalls of ranting against their company’s policies they can still have their life destroyed by rogue internet basement dwellers (RIBD).

RIBD lurk on popular communication websites such as 4chan.org, ebaumsworld.org and enclyopeidadramatica.com and will not cease to hunt down and assassinate seemly random people’s character. RIBD user base is can vary from a few dirty teenagers to thousands of malicious users depending on the longevity of interest in the target and perceived societal importance of the reproductions of the attack. Once the RIBD have one piece of information they will find out who you live and everything about you. You will have hundreds of pizzas ordered to your house, you voicemail will be full of recordings of vulgar word phrases/death threats and your name/likeness will be plastered across the internet, defamed for now till eternity. When you name is searched it will come up first listed as a neo-nazi supporter or a child rapist.

Attention Span –
One major societal change I have noticed in the last five years is when I am riding in the car with friends. The driver will simply not stop changing songs on the car stereo even when they have only been playing for a few seconds. Instead of enjoying a nice relaxing car ride I am instead forced to listen to the first 30 seconds of every gay “favorite” song on my friends CD without any sense of continuity or how the music was naturally meant to be listened to. This A.D.D.-like (ADD is not an actual disorder) behavior is a direct product of people being exposure to a continuous, high-volume stream of information via computers and cell phones. We need to protect the finite well of our attention if we care about our relationships.

With so much information on the internet we have subconsciously trained our brains to skim content for accuracy and information density. Cellular text messaging in particular has also played a strong part in conditioning people to many short bursts of information instead of detailed and well written content. This truncated attention span has repercussions that can bleed into the work place and homestead. Millions of hours of productivity are lost daily to people sending/receiving text messages on their phones, posting on image boards and accessing personal social media sites while countless family dinners are interrupted with text messages similar to, “Wat R U up 2”? Oh the humanity. Attention is one of the most valuable modern resources. If we waste it on frivolous communication, we will have nothing left when we really need it.

Technology does improve the quality of life for some disabled and elderly individuals

So what is the solution to this digital Pandora's box we have opened up, will our quality of life continue this downward spiral? I think like many problems, there may not be a solution. There is no known cure for lung cancer only the preventive measure of not smoking. The ones that use technology the most will become overlords in there respective online domain while conversely becoming social pariahs in the reciprocal physical world. The more one uses technology, the more one allow technology to use one's self. The price you pay is in tranquillity and interpersonal relationships. Welcome to Hell, here is your complentary PDA and caffinated soda beverage.