How Does Technology Change My Life?

Picture a young girl in rural Waynesburg with her parents and five siblings. The little log house she called home had 2 foot walls and was only big enough for a person to stand in the middle of the room. The papered walls required scrubbing every week because the gas lights spread soot and, sometimes, if the wind came through the windows strong enough, they would shatter. Every day, she would lead the two horses, Pearl and Prince, out to the field to gather up the hay and to plow. She was not even tall enough to see over the plow, but that did not change the fact that it needed to be done. This might seem strange since men did the laborious work while women did the skilled work, but in this girl’s family, everyone helped with everything (Cowan …show more content…
According to her, she has seen a lot of change in her almost eight and a half decades on this planet, but technology has changed the most. Every day she looks out the window and it seems like something else has changed. Instead of having an entire family sit around a single radio at night, everyone is in different rooms watching different things or playing with different pieces of technology. People can talk on direct phone lines so only they can hear what’s going on. It is much more private. To my grandma, while this new sense of privacy and individuality with technology can be a good thing at times, it also has lessened the ability of a family to gather together every night. Now, with everyone separating into different rooms the only times families get together is at the dinner table, if they even eat dinner together at all. Another change in lifestyle that my grandma has noticed is the exchange of information. If she didn’t use the telephone when she was younger, the only other way to spread information was by mail or word of mouth. Today, the speed of life is much faster. She claims that she “can barely keep up with all the changes.” It amazes my grandma how every day there is a new way to communicate. First, direct phone lines, then car phones, then cell phones, then email, then text messaging, and finally Skype. She asks, “what’s wrong with picking up the telephone and just talking to someone? Your old grandma likes to hear your voice.” She tells me that when she talks to her neighbors about the weekly phone calls she receives from my brother and I, they get a little jealous. They are lucky if they get monthly phone calls. All they receive is the occasional text message that, sometimes, they have trouble opening. Everything keeps getting faster in the attempt to bring people closer together, but my grandma has a different perspective. She thinks we all keep getting farther apart. Before this advanced