Technological Crutch

As I stood on a street corner near Washington Square Park waiting for the NYU bus, I found myself feeling sick.  Not from the smell of the local "meat" vendor down the street - though, it has been known to make a stomach churn by the mere smell of it.  I found myself feeling sick because all I could observe around me was a crowd of students "plugged in" to technology.  In a crowd of about fifteen students, not a single person (barring the sociologist within me) wasn't texting, surfing the web on their smartphones, or jamming out to their iPods.  Far be it from me to want some sort of interaction while waiting for the bus.  It's odd to deconstruct the scenario because, in my mind, the rise of new media and technology is both a godsend and a curse.  The reasons for why it's truly a gift are evident in my blogging efforts and so much more (including my lover - Google).  The reasons for calling it a curse are a bit more difficult to identifiy.  In essence, it brings about a whole new mode of analyzing human behavior.  Previously, it had been assumed that human behavior yearns for human interaction.  Typically, when we enter a new group of people, we seek out those with whom we have something in common.  For some reason, making this connection provides us with comfort and, regardless of whether we have actually made a further connection with these people, we feel connected to them from there on out.  So why, I ask, was everyone in this group of NYU students (who all share a rather large connection relative to the rest of the world) avoiding social interaction?

As a Media, Culture, and Communications major, I feel the line behind which my loyalties lie is rather blurred.  On the one hand, I feel elation when I discover the latest "app".  I revel in the fact that the rise of social media (much like my own blog) is managing to reshape our reality as we know it, finally giving us power and control to have an active stance in items such as the news.  In other words, technology has become my baby for whom I care and observe as if every moment of its life were to be valued.  On the other hand, the sociologist within me is confuddled (go ahead - Urban Dictionary it).  I can't help but be intrigued by the new human interaction trends that I'm observing on a daily basis, but I also can't help but wonder if it's a move in the right direction.  It's one thing to have technology advancing our world and another to have it replacing it.  Are we using technology to aide us in our constant endeavors to make things ever-more efficient?  Or are we simply using it to enable our independent, hide-in-our-shells, avoid-the-world life styles?

Simply put, when the younger child starts to beat up the older child...whose side do you take?