This is personal question, and an answer must be drawn from your personal experiences with technology and examples from your own life. To help you out, let’s think about the pervasiveness of technology and all the different ways we experience it today.
Consider all the ways people use technology in a personal capacity – do you have a smartphone or a laptop? Maybe you have a tablet or an e-reader – do you use these things every day? You can probably download an app or transfer a podcast from your laptop to your iPhone without even concentrating; it’s second nature. I would imagine most people have a very high level of comfort with these sorts of personal technological devices. In addition, these things are changing the way we experience the world and the way we process information. If we want to learn about the constellations, we can simply go to the app store and download Night Sky Tools or something similar – no need to go to the library and check out books and star charts. In the blink of an eye we can have all the information we need about meteor showers and the movements of the planets in our pockets, in the same device onto which we store libraries full of music and textbooks and records of months-long conversations with friends. A certain level of comfort comes with knowing we immediate access to the answers for any questions we might have, all the time.
Or perhaps you’re technically illiterate, like my mother, who can’t figure out how to access the internet on her iPhone, doesn’t know the difference between wifi and cellular data, and until yesterday thought a podcast was something similar to a youtube video. For my mother, technology is an imposition. She feels much more comfortable writing a letter and sending it off in the mail and recalls Blockbuster Video with almost violent nostalgia.
Or perhaps you’re suspicious of technology, and while you’re comfortable using different devices from an operational standpoint you are very uncomfortable divulging any information about yourself on the internet and have a secret personal vendetta against the NSA and make all your monetary transactions in cash. There are dozens of ways you can be comfortable or uncomfortable with technology in your personal life, and they all depend on your own opinions and interactions with devices and methods. This of course extends to medical technology – perhaps you must go often to the doctor for tests and medicines, and depend on these sorts of tech advances for your health. Or perhaps you fear the increase in paranoia and unnecessary testing and prescriptions these health advances make us think we need, when in fact they could be causing lasting harm.
Professional technology is a different matter, and without knowing any context it will be difficult to give examples relevant to your situation. But think of all the ways technology is altering the way we interact with the workplace: ever since the early twentieth century machines have been replacing humans in factories, and more and more jobs are being performed by computers that once were performed by people. Maybe this idea makes you uncomfortable. Or maybe the use of computers makes your job quicker and easier – you are able to organize and process data in half the time using spreadsheets and programs, which frees up your time for other job-related matters. Workplace satisfaction and quality of work might be improving because of this extra time allowed by digital input and organization of data. Maybe you’re a computer engineer, or a web designer, careers which wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for technology.
In order to answer this question you must draw from your own experiences. Hopefully this has given you some idea for a starting point when considering the various ways technology has a lasting impact on our lives – it could also help to imagine what your life would be like if all of a sudden someone denied you access to your phone, or to a washing machine, or to the radio in your car – how uncomfortable would that make you feel?
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