It's the Final Blog Post *off tune kazoo solo*

Technology surrounds us. It's taken over our world in nearly every sense, from the cars we drive to the phones in our pockets to smart homes and lightbulbs that turn on when you ask them to. We as a society depend on technology to nearly ridiculous extremes, and being disconnected, even for short spans on time, can set us super off track. Just a few days ago my phone glitched out and stopped being able to access my email, and in the few hours before I could get home and check my account from my laptop I'd gotten 12 emails! Some were just spam, but bunch of them were about upcoming exams, and it's a little bit scary to think what might've happened if I'd missed them? What if, without having the instant access that my phone allows, I had forgotten to check my email? I might have missed the message from my photography professor, telling us the prompt for our final essay, I might've missed the email about the final blog post count for this class, I might have even missed the message from my boss asking me to come in early for my shift the next day. Whenever I think about technology through this lens it terrifies me, and the only thing I can think is that I'm far too dependent.

My Dungeons and Dragons group at a smash room to deal with final's week stress, back in a time before quarantine.

On the other hand, technology is wonderful! Using the internet, me and my friends have been able to meet every single Sunday to have our weekly Dungeons and Dragons session, even during quarantine! We have three players in North Carolina, two in Florida and two in Boston, but we've been able to keep participating in the story almost exactly the same way we did when we were all sitting together at the same table, sharing dice and throwing nachos at each other for making bad puns. My best friend, who lives in Alabama, is able to text and call me whenever she wants! She can send me pictures of her dog and introduce me to her sister, and we can even have our Friday night movie marathon just the same as always. Being connected 24/7 is a gift just as much as it's a curse.

Even disregarding the benefits of staying connected through the web, the sheer amount of information available to us at any given moment is staggering. I could spend every minute of the rest of my life combing through Wikipedia and I'd still probably never find the end. I can spend hours on YouTube watching documentaries about places and animals that people that lived 100 years ago couldn't even dream of. Every December the app that I use to listen to music gives me a summary of my listening habits, shows me how my tastes have changed and how I've discovered and started enjoying new music and podcasts through out the year. We have the amazing privilege of living in a time where it's possible to pull a supercomputer out of your pocket just so you can ask it a pointless question to settle a meaningless argument. Human beings are hard wired to learn, we take every opportunity we can to explore and gather knowledge and information, and then we make it available to every body, and that is one of the truly beautiful things about technology.

And of course I worry about a lot of things that have to do with technology. What will I do if my laptop dies before I save my essay? What happens if my phone breaks and I loose my photos and other data? What if I get hacked and my information is compromised? I've taken all the steps I can to avoid these problems becoming real. I back up my documents to an external drive, I use a VPN online, especially when I'm shopping, I back my phone up every week. Tech, just like anything else, has its advantages and drawbacks. It's going to keep evolving whether we're on board or not, and rather than being ragged reluctantly along, we should take all the steps we can to make sure we have the tools to keep ourselves safe and private, so that we can enjoy the benefits brought to us by our ability to connect to each other and the world around us. 

I think that, overall, my opinion of technology is very positive. I'm not usually the optimist among my friends, but this year especially I've seen so many of the ways that technology benefits people, so many ways that it helps us stay in touch with others, to learn new things and remember old ones, to share important things like group projects and silly things like cat videos. As people we're designed to be social, to stick together, and we were able to do that this year, even when things got hard. Humans are complicated, and things we create, technology included, are a reflection of us in that way. The things we make and help and harm in equal measures, and well our dependence on technology is certainly something to be concerned about, the way we as a people have nearly always used technology as a way to speak to and reach out to each other is something that I hope stays the same.