Electronic Addiction

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Electronic Addiction

Welcome to the world of the over stimulated, desensitized, and burnt out. There is a huge problem in our society, a problem that I cannot claim to be free of by any means; in fact, as I sit here writing this I am feeling its effects. The worst part of this issue is that it started for me in early childhood, as it did for many others. Kids start younger than ever before and they use more frequently. The fix is never good enough. New mediums are being created and old ones are being improved all the time. Our largest industries revolve around it. It seems to create in the users a need for more and more; it is an unending cycle that eventually can destroy one's life socially and in every other way too.

When did this problem start? It has been around since the turn of the century, but at that time it was not nearly as common as it is now and it didn't often consume people's lives as it does today. As people experimented they developed more effective techniques but it wasn't until the late fifties that the problem first came in to the average home. In my opinion the invention of the television set was the beginning of the end of humanity, as they knew it. Now, since I was not alive for any time before this happened, I cannot know for sure that things were significantly different then, but all the films and television shows I have seen seem to indicate that it was. Apparently there was a time when people still had the ability to talk to each other seriously and for periods of time that exceeded twenty minutes; legends presented in a million pixels of high definition tell me that at one point people lived their lives through experiences that were their own, they read books and decided what they need...

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...d. I then went back to bed and read another fifteen pages before trying to sleep. I got almost no sleep that night though I kept looking for that bubble above my head with the little Z's. Now whether this was a chemical response or was psychosomatic I cannot be sure, but the effects were there all the same.

These effects are not uncommon and although not everyone suffers from them as much as the young, there is definitely an effect on everyone's life. We lose the ability to concentrate, to make conversation, to write, and to function in a world that does not depend on a sequence of on's and off's. When we live in an alternative world lit by cathode rays, we dwell in and visit 'the real world' when we want something different, but what about those people who like to be comfortable in a static state? When will they visit this quickly fading 'real world'?

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