Does technology help us save time or waste time?

Save time

10 of 13

by Linda Caye Murphy

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To say that technology saves time is to say the obvious.

Sweeping changes wrought by technology have transformed the worlds of communication, education, business, entertainment, travel health care, medicine, food service, publishing, finance and just about every other facet of our lives.

Perhaps if you are under age 40 you have no real perspective on the extent of change that technology has brought over the past several decades. So, as a person who has lived through enough decades to experience it first hand, let me give you some examples.

In the mid-70s, I worked in the corporate public relations business where to write, get approvals, finalize and distribute a simple news release was a one- to two-week process. A writer wrote the article by hand or on a typewriter, a secretary retyped it and sent it to customers for approval via the U.S. mail. Under the best of circumstances, the release would come back approved within a week. Then the writer would incorporate suggestions and changes, basically rewriting the article after which a secretary would type it again and finalize it for distribution to the news media - once again via the U.S. mail. Today, thanks to computer technology and the Internet, the entire process can be completed in just a few hours.

Let's look at another example: Cooking dinner. In the pre-microwave oven days, preparing a meal took several hours and involved peeling, chopping, dicing, mixing, breading, browning and baking several different food items. Today, you just open a package, zap it for two minutes and dinner is on the table.

Or how about shopping? Not all that long ago, shopping for something new might require several trips to different stores in different parts of the city to compare the prices and quality of similar items. Today, a savvy consumer can learn everything he or she needs to know about a product by spending a brief time on the Internet. And with the click of a mouse, the product can be ordered, paid for and delivered right to your front door.

If there are still doubters out there, just consider what technology has done to speed interpersonal communications. I grew up in a world where people wrote letters - with pens on paper - to far away friends and relatives and actually sent them through the mail. E-mail technology today has compressed the speed of sending printed messages from several days to nanoseconds.

And talk about saving time, not so long ago if you needed to reach a person quickly you called on the telephone, hoping someone was home to receive the call. Today, with cell-phone technology people are reached immediately wherever they are, any time of the day or night, anywhere in the world, on the job or on vacation. And if by chance you do not connect by cell-phone, it is not a problem. You simply send a text!

While some people may indeed use technology to waste time, technological developments of the past few decades have contributed more to saving time and energy than has anything else since ancient civilizations first invented the wheel.

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