Since the freshmen have been given laptops, I have noticed a bit of an addiction and lack of social interaction between them. Every morning when I walk through the hallway to my locker, it is flooded with freshmen sitting next to an outlet on their laptop. I understand the purpose of giving them the laptops, but to me it seems to be a distraction and detrimental to a few other aspects of their lives. It feels like I’m in a real life version of Wall-E when I see everyone’s faces glued to a screen constantly.

Although having personal laptops can be useful and handy for a number of different reasons, they seem unnecessary to me because we have gone so long without them and haven’t had any problems. I worry that the world is becoming too dependent on technology to notice the negative effects it has.

I have also noticed an increasing number of toddlers at the grocery store playing a game on a smartphone in the shopping cart, which makes me wonder when and why that became socially acceptable. I didn’t have a cell phone until seventh grade and didn’t have texting until my freshman year and I turned out just fine. Why do people think it’s necessary to provide kids with technology at a younger age? I think that keeping kids occupied with smartphones and iPads detracts them from using their imagination or trying to do something active or creative.

It seems like society is starting to believe that updated technology is the solution to all of life’s problems, but I think it is actually the source. Many people think that unhealthy food is to blame for increasing childhood obesity, but addiction to technology is just as much to blame. These days if you give a kid an option between going outside to play or to play Angry Birds on an iPad, they are more than likely going to choose the iPad over doing something active outdoors.

The solution to that would be to just not even give them the choice. Otherwise, when they grow up, they aren’t going to have many funny memories of things they did with their friends outside because the majority of their childhood was spent staring at a screen. That deeply disturbs me.

The laptops for the freshmen may not seem like that big of a deal to most people, but to me it seems like another step in the wrong direction for society. It takes away from their ability to be free thinkers if they can just google anything within seconds on their new school-provided laptops.