Are We Losing Touch With Our Ability To Communicate?

It's a well known fact that our generations are becoming more and more dependent on technology. We are so dependent that we cannot even go a class period without checking or feeling the urge to check our phones. The teenagers today spend more time (more often than not) talking to each other over text than they do face-to-face. I know I can barely go through dinner without checking my phone so my mom made a rule where I had to leave it upstairs because I would constantly be looking at my phone under the table. But it isn't just the teenagers who are being affected by the technology takeover.

Even the children growing up today are rely on technology to occupy their little minds. Whenever I babysit the kids across the street from me all they do is watch tv, play on the computer, or play on their ipad. They constantly take my phone and take tons of "selfies". They tell me they can't wait until they can have a phone and that some kids in their grade already have phones. I look at them like their crazy and I told them that they don't need a phone. They say that, "everyone is getting one." The biggest lie in the book. Seriously, these are 7 and 9 year-old children surrounded by all this technology and all they want is more of it. When I was their age all I wanted was to go outside or go to a friends. All these kids do is Facetime or show each other the new game they got. It's ridiculous.

I had to interview people from certain generations about what kind of technology they had access to growing up and I had interviewed my elderly neighbor across the street. We ended up having this long conversation about how technology was affecting the generations today and she told me that when she was growing up, half the stuff we have today didn't exist. She told me that our generation was losing its touch with being able to communicate and that I had a lot of courage asking to talk to her face-to-face. She said that I was one of the few people she knew around my age that could easily communicate with others. I listened to her tell me about all the things she did as a kid and how different things were now. When I looked back at the survey we had filled out I don't even think she had a third of the things I had. It made me think of how different things are and how much different they are going to be for the generations to follow. But the technology is getting out of hand; its taking away our ability to communicate with each other in person. We need to keep using the skill of talking to an actual person rather than a screen if we want to progress in the future.