Is Technology Harming our Society?

The benefits of technology today are obvious, instant communication around the globe, e-commerce, computing power the likes of which our world has never seen; but these benefits come at quite a cost, a cost which most people here in America have not yet seen.  The cost is the sickening of our planet and its people.  How? you might ask, how is technology making people around the globe sick?  The answer is "E-Waste".  Throughout time our global communities have been making garbage dumps, all around the world, these places hold our trash in landfills and are generally not filled with toxic chemicals, but still of course are not good for the planet.  Today's fastest growing garbage dumps are filled with electronic waste, old computers, cell phones, monitors, whatever.  This type of stuff needs to be recycled properly as it contains lead, mercury, and a whole list of other stuff which can directly poison our planet and its people.   With the average cell phone only lasting around one year, people are throwing away millions of cell phones every year.  CRT and LED screens contain some of the worst toxins among electronics, and the vast majority of them are not recycled properly, with the mercury and lead seeping out into our water, or elsewhere.

As far as I know, China has the worst pollution of any country, especially in regards to E-Waste.  There are cities in China which are literal garbage dumps of electronics, as far as the eye can see.  Children are born, live, play, and die in these dumps of electronic garbage, while their parents melt down the parts for their rudimentary components.  The corporations which manufacture these electronics need to provide readily available e-waste recycling that is affordable and good for the planet.

Adapting to Tech

In this day and age, adopting and adapting to new technology is something that everyone must do.  We all do this in different ways: some people will jump head first into the new technology, blindly accepting it with open arms (Innovators), some will wait until the bugs and glitches are sorted out before hopping on the new products (Early Adopters), after these come the (Early Majority) which begin the bandwagon of new cool trends, then come the (Late Majority), fashionably late to the technological party, lastly, (The Laggers) will finally use the product, either because society forced them to by imbedding it in new systems, or simply because they were too cool to use it sooner.

Personally, I do not fit into any one category as far as this chart is concerned, but rather fit into different groups of "adopters" at different times, depending on the product or technology at hand.   When it came to services such as Facebook and MySpace, I fit into the Laggards category; I simply did not want to use these internet services because I thought it was weird to post your personal life publicly online, and thought I was too cool for such things.  Eventually, I was missing out on enough on Facebook that I decided to start using it.  Now I use it all the time and truly understand how weird and silly it is that we post our personal information online all the time!  

On another note, as far as technology and hardware are concerned, I am generally an Early Adopter or Innovator.  I seem to hear about and want new hardware, such as cutting edge computer parts, long before they are released.  I would usually wait until generation 2 of a technology came out to invest in it seriously, but in the case of Solid State Hard drives, or "SSDs", I jumped on the first suitable drive I could for my PC, being one of the first in the early adopters category.  This SSD was the Intel XM series with 160 Gigabytes of storage, and speeds up to 100x faster than Hard Disks of the day (2010), it cost $400.  I still use this hard drive and it holds up well to today's expectations in 2013.  I recently upgraded my PC and bought the newest SSD on the market, the Samsung EVO 840, with 250 GB storage space, at the comparably low cost of $180.   This new SSD is a prime example of why I would usually wait to invest in a new technology, it was under half the cost (even cheaper by price per gigabyte), and several times faster.  

...should have just waited and bought three of these