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Topic #31: What’s one piece of technology you can’t live without? What technology do you wish would disappear from the world?

The answer to this question is a little obvious in my situation, but the one piece of technology that I can’t live without is probably the Internet.

The Internet has become one of the biggest parts of my life – I use it everyday for all different kinds of reasons, ranging from educational purposes to entertainment purposes to communication purposes. A big part of my university is online; I have to use the Internet to enroll for classes, get up-to-date information about the classes I’m taking, and download documents and other resources needed to succeed in those courses. The Internet is also influential indirectly, as I use it frequently to find other sources to do research to either complete the required coursework or learn more about the topics we’re covering.

A lot of people around my age spend a lot of time watching television, but I almost never do. When I was at my home town, I would occasionally be exposed to some television because my parents frequently and loved to watch television. However, now that I am in my own apartment at university, I don’t have a television in my room and I have no reason to have one. The only exposure I have to television is when I’m walking past my apartment’s lobby area where there’s a television on, or in my workplace. As a result, the time spent watching television for me has been cut down to several seconds a day.

As a substitute, I use the Internet for my entertainment. My direct replacement for television is online video websites like YouTube. I also have indirect substitutes like reading the news instead of watching it, and reading other comedic content online instead of watching comedy shows or dramas.

Finally, the Internet is one of the frequent methods I use to communicate with others. I generally tend to stay in my apartment when I’m not walking to class, in class, or at work. As a result, my person-to-person socialization time has been cut down drastically. Instead, I use email, instant messaging, and text messaging to talk with friends, co-workers, and other people that may choose to contact me for any reason. I also don’t like talking on my cell phone, and only take calls from family members or for urgent issues. Instead of text messaging from my phone, I text message from my computer or my iPod Touch via an Internet connection, which makes the Internet more important again.

I don’t think there’s a particular piece of technology that I wish would disappear from the world. My original intention was to say any advanced weaponry like guns, because if they were never invented, people would not use them at all and many innocent lives would be spared. Some people might argue that if guns weren’t invented, the police and other law enforcement officials would have a difficult time maintaining order, but if criminals didn’t have access to guns, police would not have to worry about using guns of their own.

But when I thought about it some more, I realized that in situations where many unarmed people join up to form a riot or rebellion, police need the extra help from advanced weapons. Even if many people are unarmed, if they are attacking in massive numbers, it is difficult to contain them. Thus, I decided that all the technology that we have now should stay as a symbol of our historical advancements through time.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 10

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0