People are, relying too much on this APP here, that once it’d stopped working, their lives, HALTED! Off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
LINE crashed for twenty-minutes yesterday afternoon, and a lot of the folks using the system can’t get their messages out, complained of how their lives, work are, greatly impacted by it. Some of the media even used a ton of emotionally-based headlines including, “Taiwan had fallen to hell”, and “all the online community is moaning and groaning about it.” LINE became the most widely used communication app across Taiwan, surely, because it’s inseparable from people’s daily lives, but, allowing oneself, and the interactions with others to get bound by one solitary app to this extent, it’s truly, unsettling.
instead of this…
LINE was originally designed as an instant message program, so people can interact with one another not using a phone, text, or e-mail. Not only can it be used in one-on-one, one-to-many, and multiple ways of communication, there are, also, the transmitting of messages using emoticons, words, photos, images, sound, films. Not only did it increase the speed of transmission, it’d also added some interesting measure we can interact with one another, that other means of communication didn’t give up. But, because of our habits of use being different from one another’s, it’d, caused, a ton of, problems too.
Let me give a few random examples: because of the prevalence of the use of LINE, the spread of false messages are even more prevalent, and, the emoticons, the pictures showing our elders that we cared for them became, a sort of, a mockery, worrying that our messages had been read, but the receiver didn’t reply back, and we’d let our minds wonder, and, the groups which were originally set up, to keep the connections intact, split apart, due to differences in political standings, the things we deal with better face-to-face, getting resolved, too casually, too careless, on screen. And, the increases in the number of messages coming to a person daily from work, life, personal, and/or families, making us worry we may miss something important, adding to the stresses to our day-to-day life.
Did the smartphone really, make our lives easier? Or, are we, more and more reliant on these high-tech gadgets we become, stupid? People today can’t be away from technology, but, we can’t, not examine our attitude, our usages of, the various types of technologies available to us.
The former editor of “Wired Magazine” Kevin Kelly stated, that every time a new technology becomes available, he’d attempted to understand it, and use it for a period of time, to see if the newly invented technology fits him, his beliefs has been influenced by his interactions with the Amish people. The Amish who are deemed as living their lives too simplistic “may be the ultimate creators and master DIY”. They’re not against using new technologies, but from what they cared about the most, and examined if the newly invented technology is, good or bad for their specific value system. If it’s beneficial, then they’re recommend it for the people to use, if it’s harmful, then, they’d prohibit the members of their community from using it, but, the key was to reduce the impacts, and increase the benefits.
There are the ancients from China who’d told us, to be the owners of things, and not let the things own us. Although, the things that are referred to from the ancient times is different from the things we have available to us, but, there’s always going to be a relationship between us and our things; and, I can only imagine, that we will, become slaves of these, machines, and stop working when these high-tech inventions stopped functioning for us.
And because, we let ourselves become overly reliant on these high-tech devices, these means of communications, we are, screwing ourselves over, because once these things stopped functioning (like your computers crashing, your phones stopped working, etc., etc., etc.) you don’t know how to interact with the world around you, because we’d all become, too reliant on these things to connect us to one another, that we forgot, that sometimes, interactions with the outside world comes best when it’s face-to-face!
Life, the Obstacle Course 