Taking The Good With The Bad

So last week while enjoying the pleasures of a reading week from Uni, I had the unfortunate experience of having my flat burgled. My Mac, DSLR and iPod were all stolen and to make it all worse insurance isn't covering them.

This was the first time in as long as I can remember that I truly felt completely removed from all technology and I admit that I didn't like it. It began to get me thinking however of how important "technology" is to us. I think the idea of being connected with people is the most important thing, as I spent 1 night without a laptop and it felt like an age. In all honesty though, like me the first thing many people do when they go on the computer is immediately check their facebook, or their email as without it now we genuinely feel lost.

I don't necessary think this is a bad thing as in the modern world this is the way things are done now. WiFi is available on buses, trains, in airports, schools etc so that there is never a moment that we are truly alone. It is not that we are techno crazy but that the feeling of security is offered and everyone craves that. Not necessarily always in the literal sense of talking to friends or family 24/7 but the security of knowing that in your hand is all your music or all your pictures, as these are things that say a lot about us and are paramount in daily life to making us feel at home.

Although a great deal of negatives have came out of this situation, one small positive has been produced. It has given me a topic that I now feel strongly about and an opinion that I could possibly use in some form to build a dissertation question from.

In all the lectures we have had so far in, design studies, on our dissertation, the lecturer has stated that our topic should be something that we feel strongly about. Questions that relate to our dependence on technology or variations of this would now be of great interest to me as they have a more personal link.

Just last week I recently discovered Google Reader and realised how much easier it would make things as I wouldn't have to trawl through lots of different blogs and web pages. After last weeks events though, I'm wondering if depending on things like this simply make life more difficult in the long run. If we lose our laptop for example then we have lost more than just an expensive piece of equipment. Just something to think about.