With our society rapidly advancing toward a future full of technology people are questioning if we are using too much of it.

Today you see children and teenagers of all ages on their phones 24/7, scrolling through their Twitter feed or liking pictures on Instagram. Adults aren’t much better off, typing away on their laptops or computers and emailing their co-workers for work.

Adolescents especially finds themselves mostly indoors and sedentary because of their addiction to their phones. According to a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey created by researchers at Stanford University, the percentage of physically inactive women from 1994 to 2010 increased from 19.1 to 51.7 percent. As for men, their percentage went from 11.4 to 43.5 percent in that same time span.

According to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average child spends around two and a half hours on music each day, five hours of television and movies and three hours of internet and video games. That adds up to roughly 75 hours of technology usage every week.

Children as young as four years old are receiving personal tablets and iPads loaded with educational games. Before kids used to received plastic flip phones as toys instead of real iPhones that kids are getting handed to them.

Maybe seeing a kid sitting for a couple minutes playing Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja shouldn’t raise any alarm, but when those couple of minutes turn into hours or days, then we should start getting involved.

It doesn’t help that nationally schools are also starting to incorporate more technology in the classroom.

At school, rather than sitting at a desk and taking down notes from what is written on the whiteboard, students are viewing the lesson overview from the projector. Worksheets and hand-written essays are forgotten as teachers are trying to ways to utilize the laptops to create in-class Power Points or Webquests. 

If that wasn’t enough, students, after a long day of school, go home and find themselves forced into turning on their computers to type up an essay or search up pictures for their history project and the list goes on.

If you’re someone who’s not up to date with modern programs and gadgets and you want to raise or keep your academic marks, then you better start paying attention.

While technology is arguably brainwashing our generation, there are indisputable benefits that have resulted due to these technological advancements. Everyone, from children to adults, have a cellphone on them at all times which allows our generation to communicate effectively.

Knowledge is now more accessible to us because of the internet. There are even more job opportunities arising because of the need for professionals in this field.

These upsides make it hard to argue against the increased use of technology, but the downsides are so obvious that they are hard to ignore.

If you are someone subjected to this overuse of technology you should be willing to stomach these risks that come along with the overuse of technology.