Stop cursing Technology - or stop using it!

After yesterday’s diary post I received an email of a person who is concerned of people’s health. She wanted to make me more aware of the negative effects that for example radiation can have on your body or how sitting too long in front of a computer can damage your back. I am well aware of these points and told her so but I want to repeat one point to be just very clear: don’t condemn modern technology if you are using it for your convenience!

I have heard many people saying that they don’t like mobile phones. They don’t want to be always available. But nevertheless they have a mobile with them at all times. I have also met people who said they don’t like facebook at all but at the same time they use it, have thousands of friends. I had conversations with people who thought with the sending of emails the original feeling of getting mail, of receiving a letter gets lost. It is too instant. I even heard someone say they don’t like Google but prefer looking words up in a real dictionary – but for specific questions and advice even they go and search online.

This is the kind of controversy which I believe is not nice and not even good psychologically. If you have the attitude that anything is bad but you do it anyway, you will make yourself feel bad. While you are sending your email you permanently think ‘How impersonal this is! Letters were much better!’ With this attitude you only make yourself unhappy!

Additionally you upset those people who use all those technologies with joy and who don’t want to hear you complaining about them – especially if you use them yourself!

If you really want to be consequent, then you should not use any of the devices and functions that you don’t like! Go and buy a nice pen and good paper, write a letter by hand, buy a stamp and an envelope and send it by post. Do that early enough so that the other person receives it on time because there is no mail on Sundays and holidays and it can take two days to several weeks, depending on where in the world you are sending it to. That would be the right way to deal with your dislike of the product ‘email’.

As far as the questions of health are concerned, I agree that you need to take care but that is simply your responsibility for your own body. You need to see yourself that you don’t sit in the wrong posture in front of your computer so that it could hurt your back. In the same way you have to however take care to walk in the right way, too, so that your posture does not hurt your spine – and that has nothing to do with technology!

I am simply opposed to condemning and cursing something that you use in your daily life. Such an attitude makes you and others unhappy. Change something or stop complaining.