Computers Impact on our Lives

            Computers have been created to help make our lives easier. However there are times when computers can make life more difficult. Often times when computers decrease effectiveness it is because they cause problems that people did not foresee them having to deal with. These problems are often trivial things that people just do not know how to deal with. This causes small problems to become even larger problems that are very time consuming. The amount of time used to figure out and solve the problems is what prevents people from being productive in these scenarios. An article I read was written by a man who helps code and edits websites. He was moving a client’s website from one domain host to another and was asked to add something. The man described this as a ten minute task. However an extra piece of code that was added prevented him from being able to log in and make the necessary changes. He tried everything he knew to do and even searched the internet for other possible solutions to the problem he could not find. Upon finding the problem it took only five minutes to fix it. By the end of all this it took someone a grand total of an hour and forty minutes to solve a problem that in reality took only five minutes to fix. This is a perfect example of how we expect computers to make our lives easier. In reality we rely on computers too much and often times run into a problem that we do not foresee. These problems are often odd enough that we cannot come up with a solution to the problem but have a simple solution. We live in a society where we expect everything to come to us simply. We do not want to think or have to be innovative to solve our problems. Computers can easily prevent us from being productive and unforeseen problems can be the greatest factor that prevents us from being productive.

            On the other hand computers have made our lives easier and allowed us to do things that we would never be able to be done without a computer. Computers help us to control and even maintain other pieces of technology. Computers combined with the power of the internet allow us to be connected to almost anything we want. Every airport has computers to tell them where planes are, both coming to and leaving the airport. We can monitor just about anything we want. Even on planes there are computers to monitor the plane. It can tell the pilots if anything is wrong with the plane. The problem with computers now is simply the fact that everyone has a cell phone. They can do just about anything a computer can and we can carry it in our pocket. However the biggest problem is that we have begun to rely on computers too heavily.  Without them and all of the technology we have today we would be very lost.

 

Langer, Maria. "When Computers Reduce Your Productivity." An Electric Mind. 4 May 2011. Web.