Enabling Technologies Essay

Technology is one form of human assets that has capacitated human civilization to develop by leaps and bounds since ages. For me, technology has made my life trouble-free and convenient. Due to technology I have to put little effort and I get greater inputs and results. Furthermore, with passage of time, I have established emotional attachment with some manifestation of technology, for example my automobile. So technology has not only facilitated my life but it has elevated my living standards. This paper will explore how technology helped my life and entertained me in one way or the other. It has enabled me to access more information worldwide and provided with various medium of enjoying my life. This paper will further look at how technology has contributed toward my self-development and how it helped me to socialize me in a proper way. Internet and socialization & accessibility My relationship to technology involves to its two basic functions. Accessibility is the foremost feature of technology that I use and have used frequently to solve my daily problems. I can access a wealth of information using variety of technologies e. g. Internet, television, cell phone, radio. But I use internet quite frequently to access information and spend my leisure time. Socialization is another aspect of internet technology that I use the most. With the emergence of internet technology, online friendship has thrived by leaps and bounds. Over the last decade more and more people are getting in touch via computer and Internet access. This phenomenon is known as cyber socialization. Internet is most convenient and easily accessible way to get in touch with others and to create relationships. My first memory to use this feature of internet goes back to 2001 when I used the chat rooms for the first time. I joined the chat rooms of various communities including my native community, my old class fellows, and communities on some of my favourites topics. I joined one chat on war against terrorism in 2003 and learnt a lot about the views of different groups on this war. It included viewpoints from Muslim countries on jahadists, talibans and American jingoists as well as the American viewpoints and feelings on the issue of 9/11. So I was able to look on both viewpoints instead of single-sided viewpoints as propagated by American media. Later on, I joined Facebook and Orkut in 2006 and created my own communities and chat rooms. This aspect of technology has not only helped me in socialization but also helped me to learn about the opinions of others. It further instilled in me the ability to respect others’ viewpoints, beliefs and opinions. This will further make possible for me to understand diversity in human thoughts and to learn from these thoughts and beliefs. Access to this information has permitted me to understand my role in creating a peaceful and peace-loving world. Internet socialization helped me in another way. I was very shy at the threshold of adulthood and was unable to discuss my sexual problems with anyone at home or school as I was only 12 years old. So I took the opportunity and posted my questions and issues about sexuality online and got satisfying answers. Most of the major servers (such as MSN and AOL) have sexuality forums in which individuals can go to discuss issues relating to sexuality. Most of the chat rooms were based on discussions about variety of sexual topics and people engaged in them are from different age groups. So I got my queries answered by experienced persons. So it was internet technology that helped me to get sexual maturity in a proper way and at the right time. So this manifestation of technology has meant a lot to me and I think it is one of the most beneficial contribution of technology toward my life. It has allowed me to understand my biological self and needs. It further enabled me how much one can help other through this medium of technology and I will continue helping other as others have helped me. Internet is a growing positive force in one’s educational lives as it provides easy and round-the-clock access to the education through various means. Back in 1999, my parents considered the education as the single most frequent and vital motivation to buy me a computer thus enabling me to use Internet. Although internet capacitates students to learn in a traditional way by attending online classes and tutorials and reading online books material and stuff but it taught me in an unconventional way i. e. to gain knowledge and information by using useful websites and discussion rooms. It also enhanced my general knowledge and created in me a high rationality level and awareness about various contemporary socio-cultural issues. The most important features of education through internet are its all-pervasiveness and all-time availability that enabled me to get education anywhere anytime. I used to search various topics online about current affairs and general knowledge and I used to surf from one web page to other page accumulating a wealth of information. I did not go to library to search pages and pages to locate some information related to some topics of my interests. I needed not to schedule my learning timings as online access was 24 hours round and I was able to get information depending on my mood and my convenience. Later on Wikipedia was introduced and now I am able to enhance my general knowledge by reading articles on various subjects on www. wikipedia. com. I used to read stories since my childhood and purchased story books for this purpose. But in 2002 I found and accessed some stories online. So there was no need to spend extra amount on story books and I used to enjoy these stories online. With the passage of time, I nurtured a taste for literature. I found a lot of literature online but to read more books online, I got paid access to Questia online library in 2005. This use of technology has helped me to et better grades in my academic life and to understand the world and life in general. It is also important as it takes little efforts and time to get more information. Another relationship between and internet technology was established when I was hankering after a job in 2005. Job-hunting is always a laborious task that requires too much effort and paper-work. But internet made this easier for me. Before the development of internet, well-established conventional recruitment methodologies were in common practice where newspapers ads and job fairs were the usual practices and norm of the organization involved in the hiring process. The conventional process of recruitment used to operate in specific geographical boundaries and was characterized by national and international boundaries. Another hallmark of this traditional hiring methodology was that jobs were advertised at a standard time. But with the advent of internet and the development of online recruitment process, these geographical and time restrictions were removed. Online jobs advertisement and information is available to everyone everywhere and anytime. Accessibility of jobs are no problem and one can download a job at 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and it is reachable by any individual from next door to people sitting in other continents. So I used this e-recruitment option to get a job in 2005. Facilitating Life through Technology Technology has facilitated the life to a great extent. It has made my life easier by providing a lot of facilitations. The foremost of technologies that has affected my life is electricity. Since the age of three, I had a dependence on electricity as I used to charge batteries of my toys using electricity. When I grew younger, I learnt that most of the things that I use in life are dependent on electricity. Electricity used to provide me with sufficient heating in extreme colds when everything outside used to freeze. Without it cool breezes in summer were not possible. In my childhood and adolescence, most of the things related to my entertainment were dependant on electricity. TV, DVD player, computers, play-stations, music systems, digital cameras, video cameras, lights, refrigerators etc. were all activated when plugged into an electricity source. My automobile is another manifestation of technology. I learnt to drive auto at the age of 14 and since then, my automobile is one of my best companions. I have a very personalized relationship with it. Whenever I needed to roam around, to meet my friends mile away, to visit a relative, my automobiles was willing to satisfy my wishes. Beside these wants and wishes, there were genuine needs and requirements. For example, in 2005 it happened that I lost some of my medicines somewhere in the house at night, so I needed to visit a chemist late at night to get some medicines. The nearest chemist was about 10 miles away. If there would have been not automobile, it would have taken me 2 hours on foot to reach the chemist in that cold shivering night. This was horrifying. But my automobile was there and I reached to chemist in 10 minutes and got the required medicines. So for me, automobiles and other means of transport are not accessories or luxuries but they are genuine necessities as it have enabled me to save my life. I am interested in the development of more quick and swift transport like jets and bullet trains as it will reduce the wastage of time traveling from one place to another. I have a very deep relationship with my computer. When I first purchased a Pentium computer in 1999, its essential purpose was entertainment i. e. to play games, to watch videos. I also used it to perform it certain other simple tasks like communication using my e-mails using Hotmail and Yahoo and perform simple calculations. With the passage of time my interest grew up. It became an everyday necessity in my life. As mentioned earlier, I used internet and got various educational and social benefits. I used to create my school reports on it using Microsoft Word. In 2003, I helped my mother by creating an inventory of household items on Microsoft Excel. Through everyone in house was able to locate particulars things that were placed at particular places. I further helped my mother to manage budgets and have a record keeping of daily utilities on Excel sheet. In 2004, I bought a Sony Cyber-shot digital camera and stored albums of my friends and family on computers. I shared these with rest of friends by sending through e-mails. This was cost effective as well as convenient. So computer not only facilitated my life but it also helped me to facilitate my family members. Entertaining Life through Technology Beside physical needs, humans have aesthetics needs too. To fulfill aesthetics needs entrainments in necessary. Technology has also revolutionized the field of entertainment. I too enjoy watching TV and going to cinema houses whenever I have time. My first encounter with TV goes back to childhood days when I watched cartoons at the age of 3. Later on I switched over to movie channels and latest shifts were news channels like BBC World and CNN in 2007 that enabled me to keep an eye on the changing world affairs. I also enjoy listening music in MTV and Channel V but I prefer to enjoy a full-fledge multimedia system for music. Going cinemas is another encounter with technology. The big screen with great sound system produces an atmosphere of grandness and movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park provide real entertainment in this atmosphere. At the age of 12, I went to cinemas with my parents for the first time. From that time till now, it becomes a habit of mine to go for movie with my friends occasionally. Sony play-stations and Nintendo game portals are other sources of technological entrainment that I often use. Though my relationship with game is old but I still enjoy playing adults games on Nintendo. Combating in tough real life scenario in games not only entertains one but it also educate one how to coup with the difficulties of life and how to remove hurdles. I recalled several images from games and made comparisons whenever I went through some real life challenges. Conclusion Although I have encircles only three main features of technology that covers various technologies but it must be kept in mind that we use one aspect or manifestation of technology every minute. And with everyday there comes a new technology and another becomes obsolete. So world of technology is dynamic where one needs to adopt the emerging and changing technologies. We also not forget that like every product, technology too has its bad effects. We should look into its positive effects and should work together with developers and scientists to minimize its negative effects.