Does technology control you? Or do you control it?

The answer for me is definitely the former one. Because of its transparency, technology exerts a lot of control on me.

The following are the media that I use daily:

Mobile phone

Facebook

Taobao (It’s an online shopping website)

If I have to rank the level of control they have over me, I would probably say Taobao comes first, then Facebook and finally mobile phone. Every day when I get home from school, the first thing I will do is to visit and check Taobao because I don’t want to miss any updates about the shops or special and beautiful items. Perhaps you would think that I have been too addicted to it, but actually, I always feel that there is an invisible hand pushing me to do that without any notice. But who controls this invisible hand? They are the media and technology.

I am just the same as many people who log in their Facebook automatically and check it constantly every day no matter they are free or busy. We do it routinely just like we need to eat and sleep daily.  I read an article that is about Arianna Huffington, the president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, saying that she started her Huffington Post because she recognized the “obsessive compulsive nature of the web”. (Quoted from jeffbullas.com) It is same as the media.
 
The media make us forget its existence between us and the reality. It is just like Rodney said, they have become transparent! There are many things that we do but we don’t know why we do them. For example, if we check Facebook and visit Taobao continually, we don’t know why but we think it is natural. Why it is natural? It is because we lack consciousness about the existence of the media when we are doing it. Let me take myself as an example. When I keep on visiting Taobao, I have forgotten that it is just a kind of meditational means which makes me feel like I am actually looking around and shopping in different boutiques, talking to the shop assistants “face to face”.

The media are so powerful. They really wash our brain and make us believe what they said and follow what they encourage us to do. So it is true that the more we use them, the more transparent they will become and the more control they will have over us. 

However, some kinds of technology control are just confined to some hand-held devices such as mobile phones or iPad. People spend a lot of time on texting, playing games or using the Apps etc like they are living in an isolated island. In fact, they do that just out of boredom. It is not like the people visiting the websites because they need to find some information for their reseach project. I think the former group of people can avoid being controlled a bit if they analyze it.