Today, more and more people have access to electronic items such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. These items are available to the young and to the old, to the poor and to the rich, and to the famous and to the infamous. And while these items have many advantages, they certainly have many drawbacks.
Electronics can negatively affect vision. Computers, tablets, and smartphones can stress your eyes. This is not because that they are glowing screens but because they are closer to your eyes. Most people spend hours a day on electronic devices. Before electronics were available on a global scale people used to look at objects closely for a less amount of time. Now, people are constantly staring and close up smart phones without giving their eyes any rest. My school gave every student an iPad, and my vision has declined since then. Electronics are major causes of vision problems.
Furthermore, electronics can hurt your social life. People now do most of their socializing through electronics. They Facebook, iMessage, and Tweet. While this makes communication over long distances much easier and can keep friends together in different states, bad people can also gain from this. Recently someone posted extremely insulting comments about someone through social media and the victim committed suicide. If Facebook, Twitter, and iMessage didn’t exist, the victim would have to be insulted in front of his/her face. That is incredibly harder. Imagine that you were to insult me in person rather than leave a nasty comment on this blog. It would be much harder. Right? This disadvantage of electronics is very serious.
In addition electronics have security issues. Electronics have been known to be hacked. They have also been known to hack. Recently target and other major retailers just had thousands of customers get their credit cards stolen. All the information was stored on a computer–an electronic device. The hackers also used and electronic device. Nowadays, instead of having to pickpocket hundreds of credit cards individually, thieves can get a hacker to type lines of code and push one button to steal thousands of credit cards. These are then put on the black market. Now the federal agents have to find these credit card owners and notify them of the theft. Then the owners can cancel the card. The thing is that they didn’t even know that their credit card was stolen, because they still had the physical card. To extend this thought farther, the hackers just steal more credit cards, so if one person cancels his/her credit card another person gets their credit card stolen. Credit card theft can have seriously negative consequences in someone’s future. This can be caused on a massive scale by electronics.
Another disadvantage is that electronics can compromise your privacy. The United States government has been tapping into phone calls in an attempt to decrease terrorist attacks. Whether this has worked or not is still being studied, but many Americans were enraged that the their government would be secretly listening to private conversations. This was also made possible by electronics.
Overall, electronics can have many disadvantages and harmful effects. The effects can range from benign to serious. So next time you use an electronic device and think about all the things it helps you do, keep mind of the drawbacks it can have.
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