by Sunshine Simmons

Created on: December 07, 2009

Remember the days when our children played outside, people visited each other's houses, and there were telephone conversations? Technology has infiltrated our lives so badly that a whole realm of laws had to be passed about cell phone use while driving, cyber bullying, and people have simply stopped talking to each other. Humanity's obsession with technology just might be what's killing us.

Small children don't want to go outside to play anymore because they'd rather be sitting on a gamer chair playing the newest Playstation 3 or Xbox360 game. The answer? Another game system called the Wii which gets them moving, but still, they are not outside. This is causing a drop in skills that we learned outside as children such as creativity, how to build things, education about nature, entomology, and people skills.

Teenagers are sitting on the computer talking to each other on Myspace while texting each other on their cell phones. The problem with this is that we're raising a generation of introverts who have anxiety attacks at the thought of walking up to a counter at a store to get some help because they don't know how to talk to people. Getting together on a Friday night doesn't happen anymore, and if it does, they still text each other from the same room. Parents are already clueless most of the time about the lives of teenagers, but with password protection and the erase button, it's easy for our kids to be in trouble and we don't even know it. Sexting is a huge problem for children, and teenagers are having to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives because they forwarded inappropriate messages.

Adults are becoming Facebook addicts. Couples are sitting at separate laptops and sending instant messages to each other in the same house instead of using their mouths to speak. People are getting lazier and lazier because they won't get off of their rears to walk ten feet to talk to each other. Receiving text messages from within the same house is the new norm.

The reality of constant communication has taken away boundaries. Before, if you wanted a quiet evening with your family, you unplugged or ignored the phone, and people left messages with the understanding that when you checked your messages you would get back to them. Now, husbands and wives are fighting if one of them doesn't answer their phone, or at least send a text message immediately. Friends are fighting because if you don't send a message back or answer your phone, you must be mad at them. You are not allowed to do a chore or finish a project without the interruption of your cell phone.

We might as well be robots. If the future of technology is going to zap our social skills and boundaries, we are living in a bad version of the Terminator movies. Some people think that aliens with big eyes and no mouths are us from the future because we will need larger eyes to take in all of the technological media, and we won't need mouths, because we will have completely stopped talking to each other without technological aids. We're getting fatter and fatter because we won't get off of our behinds to move our bodies because we might miss a Youtube video, an instant message, or a funny status update that we can leave a clever comment for.

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