Owning a New Device

With the rapid growth of technology comes an even greater growth of want. The want is to have the latest and greatest device, whatever that may be. Nicolas Carr states that he “recently broke down and bought a Blu-ray player with a built-in Wi-Fi connection. It lets me stream music from Pandora, movies from NetFlix, and videos from YouTube through my television and stereo. I have to confess; it’s cool. I’m not sure I could live without it” (pg. 200). Carr is right; these new devices are cool. However, even Carr would agree that with these new devices follow greater distractions.

Carr mentioned that he purchased his Blu-ray player while he was writing The Shallows, and he purchased it while he was in the final stages of writing it. He said that he was “already backsliding” (pg. 200). I agree with how Carr was feeling while wrapping up The Shallows. If I purchase a new technological device, such as a gaming system or a new laptop, I feel as if that takes over my life for much longer than I initially intended it would.

The question I have regarding this matter is why does this occur? I’ve own a home computer for about five years, and even though it wasn’t my own personal computer (it was a family one) it still has the same functions as any laptop would. However, last Christmas when I got my first laptop of my own, all I could do was play around on it. I had the same access to the same websites and tools on my home computer than I did my laptop, but that seemed to not matter one bit. All I wanted to do was play around on my new device. Homework really didn’t matter; I could just push it off until later. Dinner? ‘After I’m finished with my game, mom’! This new device was running my life, as much as I hated to admit it. I think Carr would be one of the first to agree with how I was feeling.

Even to this day I still have the urge to go onto my laptop daily and browse around on the World Wide Web aimlessly. Doing this blog post alone took me about thirty minutes of procrastinating just to open up Microsoft Word. I feel that this occurs because of two reasons; these new devices present new experiences for us that are more interesting than work that we are forced to do. No one has told me to roam the internet for hours at a time; it’s my own personal decision to do that. When someone assigns a paper or an exam for the following day, it is human nature to experience nerves and uncertainty, which leads to procrastination. This leads to procrastination because we do not want to become overwhelmed with stress as a result of these assignments, so these new devices present a mental distraction from our every day lives. In Carr’s case, his stress may have been finishing his novel. Everyone, even professional writers, experiences this pressure and stress when it comes to having to accomplish an assignment. 

- Dylan Chisholm