The Effects of Technology on Modern Life

Television has truly changed the lives of most people in Britain. Nearly all British households have at least one colour television. The amount of time people spend each day watching TV is increasingly significantly every year. In the first three months of 2010 British viewers watched a record of more than four hours of TV a day on average. Some children have become addicted to watching TV and watch it all day when not in school. Referring to Passage B, children will have watched about 25,000 hours of TV by the age of 18. I believe parents need to be stricter with their children and get them involved with sports and clubs to prevent them from watching too much TV or playing games indoors. A lot of the programs on TV today including Big Brother, The only way is Essex, etc, are reality programmes that are meaningless to our everyday lives. People will do anything to get on TV nowadays! Technology is getting more advanced each day and has taken over our lives. From small fuzzy TV’s with few channels to plasma screen TV’s with hundreds, from writing letters to instantly texting someone on a touch screen phone. These are all amazing advances in technology and have changed people’s lives. Although as it says in Passage B, TV violence contributes to real violence and it influences people into bad language, sex and pain. The Internet has also changed many people lives. In Passage A, it mentions a new technology called VOIP – Voice Over Internet Protocol, so now people can phone there friends, wherever they are, for as long as you want, for absolutely free. I think this is good and bad because all though it is fast and doesn’t cost, people may then spend to much time on their phone, knowing there are no restrictions. There are also many social network sites where you can chat to friends instantly and share personal information. People as young as 10 have an account on these social network sites, which can be highly dangerous. There are pedophiles on these sites that can easily manipulate young kids. The sites try to stop these things from happening but with so many people online, it’s almost impossible to stop them all. Facebook is one of the biggest online social networking sites with over 850million users and over 3000 employees. It is one of the fastest ways to communicate with friends and share personal information. Facebook is the fastest growing social networking site and was created in 2004. You must be 13 or older to have an account on Facebook but there 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site’s terms of service. Technology is a massive thing in our everyday lives and we use it for almost everything. People can accomplished so many things using technology and it helped companies become more known, millions of people can watch the same thing at once, but its not just TV and Internet. With new technology we can fly jumbo jets around the world, visiting 100’s of different countries each day. Technology has changed massively within the last 20 years, which is very good, but could also be very bad. We need to control how we use technology, especially watching TV and the internet, because it is wasting our lives when they are many things to do and things t accomplish. This is what we have come to.