Tech's Contribution to Dysfunctional Families through Addictions

Technology becomes an important feature for people and their life styles. If we take a look around us, we are already surrounded by technology, even in classrooms. We can see many students playing their iPhones or Blackberries. There are many benefits that people get from technology which include easily communication, transportation, and entertainment. However, everything always has dark side. In the article named ‘I took my kids offline’ from The Daily guardian, Saturday 1 January 2011, In 2009, Susan Maushart has banned her children from any kind of technology for six month because she believes that technology has made her family breakout and dysfunctional from the real world.

During the time, her kid behaviors have changed into a positive way. Her kids participate in other activities such as playing sport, reading novel and playing music instead of playing internet. After analyzing this, I believe that there are several reasons why technology has contributed to dysfunctional families which include internet addiction, smart phone addiction, and video game addiction.

First of all, addiction of internet is a cause of dysfunctional families. Internet addiction is a specific term which defines many kinds of human behaviors. Internet addiction is hazardous because people often isolated staying in front of their computer or other devices[EdC00].The internet has really huge networks around the world.

In fact, 1,966,514,816 internet users are connected to online network by the internet[INT10]. However, people have less participation with their families when people used the internet. In the USA, the statistic of the average internet using duration shows that people are spending more than 68 hours on the internet at home and work place per month which means each person spends around 2 hours[Chr09].

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It shows that those internet users have only 22 hours per day left to do other activities. Moreover, people in the USA spend about 5 hour a day on the most popular social networking “Facebook.com”[Chr09]. If we count our sleeping time in the activities of each day, those people will have only 10 hours per day to do other activities (5 hours on Facebook+7hours for sleeping). Furthermore, According to the article “I took my kids offline” from The Daily guardian, Saturday 1 January 2011, Susan Maushart has shown that her kids have better sleeping time without social network. Therefore, dysfunctional families can be happened from internet addiction.

Secondly, smart phone addiction is another noticeable problem that makes families unconnected. Nowadays, many smart phones such as iPhone, Blackberry, and HTC are extremely popular in teenager societies. There are more than 50 million Blackberry users around the world[Twe10]. People spend lots of time on their smart phone and their applications more than interact with their families. Especially Blackberry, A study from Rutgers University compares that Blackberry are similar to drug because it is very addictive[Reb06]. Moreover, phone addiction can be a cause of car accident which related indirectly to families. Many people lost their family members because of people who get addicted to cell phone. For example, in 2008, there are more than 800,000 Americans were using cell phone while driving, and the number of death are 6,000 people[Car11]. Thus, smart phone can be a cause of dysfunctional families.

Finally, video game addiction is a critical problem that takes kids out of the real world. Some kids are seriously addicted to video games because video games gives chances to do things that they cannot even think in the real world such as killing, stealing, or flying in the video games called GTA. Those kids, who really addicted to video games, can spend lots of time on video games without talking with their families and this problem can lead to other problems such as starving. For example, an addicted gamer from South Korea was playing non-stop videogames called Star Craft for 50 hours and died after that[Ric10]. Plus, the study from Bangkok poll survey shows that 37.7% of adolescences aged above 10 years old in Bangkok district area play online games 3-4 days per week and 25.8% of adolescences spend 7-10 hours each time. Therefore, it is obvious that these people have less time with their families[Sirnd). Also, video game addiction can be dangerous for other family members. For instance, a young psycho gamer named Daniel Petric has killed his own mother and attacked his father because his parents did not let him to play a game called Halo 3, on his Xbox360[Rev09). Therefore, it is clear that video game addiction has created such a huge problem to family relationship.

In conclusion, internet, smart phone, and video game addiction are three main causes of dysfunctional families. However, we cannot blame only technologies because we are people who have created all of these things. All of us should know how to use them in a proper way, but people just do not care about this problem. Therefore, I believe that if everyone realize and care more about their children lifestyles. Dysfunction would not occur by technologies anymore like Susan Maushart has shown us.