Technology and us (as submitted to Planetary Magazine)

Submitted by Luciana Pimentel on Wednesday, October 06, 2004 at 11:03:52 AM EST.

Hi! We’re Ana, Amanda and Fernanda, regular teenage girls who live in the south zone of Rio de Janeiro, which is usually inhabited by middle or upper middle classes. Like most teenagers, we live with our parents. Amanda and Ana live only with their moms, while Fernanda lives with her mom and her younger sister. All of us have divorced parents, which doesn’t really bother any of us. Our parents can be really overprotective since we live in such a violent city, it can be annoying but we understand them. In our spare time, we like to go out with our friends, go to the movies, watch T.V, listen to music and use the computer.
Technology is incredibly present in our lives. From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed, it’s there. Refrigerators, microwaves, televisions, stereos, and, especially, the computers are all technological advances that nowadays are essential to our everyday lives. Computers, for example, are not only used for pleasure, but also for school, considering it’s through the internet that we do our research or even make our school work more neat and organized. However, it can have a negative side. Things become so easy that we don’t need to leave our homes to do simple daily chores, such as grocery shopping or paying our bills. Although it makes things easier, it turns people into couch potatoes as well. Our moms, for instance, hardly ever go to the bank! They prefer paying their bills over the internet, which is faster and easier, and you don’t have to wait in lines. They work a lot, so having time during the week to exercise is not that simple. We believe that these facilities in everyone’s lives can create an incredibly lazy and unhealthy generation. Also, here in Brazil greatest part of the population can’t afford to have access to this sort of technology, which makes it even harder for poorer people to get a good job, since they don’t have any computer skills.
We are not sure about our future, and what we want to do with it. But we know that certainly technology is gonna be a big part of it. Whichever career we choose, if we want to succeed, we’ll need a lot of computer skills and technological knowledge. Our predictions about the future of technology are both optimistic and pessimistic. We believe that the world is becoming more and more evolved, thanks to our advanced technology, but at the same time, we might start depending too much on it. We shouldn’t let it control us, we should control it.

Ana Luisa de Moraes Carvalho
Amanda Doring Poggi de Aragão
Fernanda Prates Ferreira
Class I11

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