Our Bittersweet Rollercoaster

In Langdon Winner’s essay he argues that with our new emerging technologies, and with old ones, that humans have been “sleepwalking” through our lives without acknowledging how much technology has changed our lives. He mentions that technology and its value to us has become so evident that no one ever takes a moment to reflect on how it affects our lives. A society that once existed with little to no advanced technology has had to open itself up to a whole new world of technology that has made our lives even more bitter sweet. We live our lives with new technologies being thrown into our faces, and marketed to make us feel that we would be archaic if we do not partake in the newest gadget. The most obvious would be the era of the smart phone. We began in the early 1990’s with our keeping up with the Jones’ mentality about smart phones. They were initially only available to those who could afford to pay several hundreds of dollars for a cellular phone. Then phone companies decided to make them more available to the everyday person by slightly lowering the prices, and making where were could just pay it off in small payments. With that being done more people had the opportunity to partake in the novelty. We stepped into this new technological world, and quickly found out how easily it could let us down. Our calls started to drop, we did not receive phone coverage where we wanted, or you simply dropped your phone on the floor, and the phones we almost no use to us at all. However, we did not bother to move on from the craze, but we become more embedded into it. Now not only can you get your $600-$900 smartphone paid off in chunks, but if a new phone comes out while you are still paying for your old one you can just trade that one in for the newest phone on the block. I agree that we have evolved into a society that wanders through our world not realizing how we have made our lives easier, and harder at the same time. We have been able to exist this way because these technologies are made so easily accessible to most of us. It is so easily accessed and makes our lives so much easier that we just take the bad with the good from them, just as we do our own lives. In our lives we have good times and we have bad times; however, we innately try our best to live in the good times and just work through the bad ones. Therefore, with our new technologies they will become more and more available and we will continue to just enjoy our bittersweet technological rollercoaster.