Second GRE essay
Essay on the topic: "Both the development of technological tools and the uses to which humanity has put them have created modern civilizations in which loneliness is ever increasing."
Human beings started to develop technological tools to dominate and control nature, but today we can see that some of these tools have also controled our personalities, increasing our loneliness.
We can divide the use to which we put these technologies in two groups: one which modify the way we entertain ouserlves and the other which modify the way we work.
In the entertainment group, we have, for example, the TV. Since its invention someone has the option to stay at home to watch some movie alone, instead of going to theater to watch a play together with his friends, which is a much more social behaviour.
Recorded music, in tapes or CDs has allowed us to also enjoy music alone at home, when in the past, we needed to go to a pub and gather some friends to play and listen to music.
The new media technologies modify our behaviour already in childhood. While in the past, kids used to spend much of their time in social games and sports, today they stay almost all day plugged in their videogames, where their closest contact with friends is through computer networks. In this case, technology can make us not only more lonely but also unhealthyer, because of the lack of physical activities.
In the work technologies group, the increasing development of transportation and communication technologies weakened the emotional binding of work teams. In the past, when these technologies were not efficient, teams usually gathered people from the same neighbourhood, which often became friends and had fun outside work. But today, with cheaper and faster planes, cars, trains and highways, someone can work far away from where he lives, sometimes even in another city, and when he comes home after work, he is alone, with no friends nearby. Telefone, e-mail and InterNet are increasingly making it possible to work in teams without the need of physical presence.
So it´s becoming possible to stay alone at home all day, working through telephone, InterNet and videoconference and having fun using equipments like videogames and TVs and DVDs.
We seem not to need each other anymore. But that´s certainly not true. Human beings need each other affection as they need food and water. And we can see this need in some more recent technological developments. People are starting to use technology to keep closer to friends. Today we can use Blogs, to share our feelings with friends all around the world; Instant messaging programs like ICQ and MSN, to talk with people far from us; and Build social networks like Orkut. Although these technologies are still incipient and cannot overcome the loneliness problem, they at least show that technology is trying to solve the problems it has generated. Maybe it´s just a matter of waiting for more development.
