Matt Richtel wrote this piece for the New York Times to forewarn us about the
increasing usage of technology in our homes and in our everyday lives. The author uses
the Campbell family, who are just your average American family, as a personal example
to enable us to see just how much technology affects our everyday lives and the ability
to maintain focus and also how it affects our brain. With the use of the Campbell family,
we are not only shown how technology affects our lives, but how it affects relationships
as a whole.

Towards the end of the article one of the researchers at Stanford University
states, 'The ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by
limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.' This is
quite alarming due to the fact that we are already seeing it wherever we go, be it
restaurants with couples that are on dates, people in class scrolling through Facebook
etc. this is one thing that we as a society must change in order to become more
sociable. Although I do agree that the author is making a valid point, I do not believe
that technology is as evil as he tries to make it seem. Yes technology has begun to
have a negative impact on this day and age, but it is also necessary to learn how to
adapt to it rather than let it consume you.

One of the main focuses in Matt Richtel article is how Mr. Campbell has allowed
the use of technology to affect his life in a drastically negative way. Mr. Campbell, who
works as a businessman, is revealed to misuse almost every second of his day using
technology. Although technology is necessary at his place of employment, he has
become so compulsive and erratic with his time using all of the technology that he has
become nearly invisible to his family and has almost removed himself from their lives
completely. Mr. Campbell is frequently absent minded due to the amount of information
that one consumes when we are 'Hooked on technology.' Matt Richtel states, 'A portion
of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More
primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay
attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.'
This in turn meaning our brain cannot handle the constant stress of having information
thrown at it.

The topic of our brain on technology is timely due to the fact that technology is
only going to become more integrated into our lives as years go by. We have seen the
trend of the use of technology increase exponentially in the past decade. This trend was
predicted by Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of the Intel that was described in a paper
written in 1965 which described accurately how technology increases every year. This
prediction which is known as Moore's law states that over the history of computing
hardware processing speed and power doubles approximately every two years and will
continue to do so as year continue to pass by. This might seem like an unthreatening
fact, but if you really think about it, if technology is so intrusive in our lives now, just how
much will it have taken over our lives in a decade from now or even in a century or
millennium.

Although the author does not mention a sense for urgency, he does mention the
need to improve our usage of technology so it does not destroy our lives. He believes
that even when we are on vacation we cannot put away our distractions 'But the day
before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and Mr. Campbell snapped one up. The
next night, their first on vacation, 'We didn't go out to dinner,' Mrs. Campbell mourned.
'We just sat there on our devices.' She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium.
Her husband joined them for a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone.' This
example shows us just how able we all have become to become unplugged. The author
of the article goes on to say that days that we spend without distractions such as email,
Facebook, and the constant need for everything to be updated are incredibly good for
our health.

In the article one of the main arguments he uses is how technology has made us
very inefficient with our time management skills. The author's urgency is easy to
perceive at times by using light hearted examples about family vacations and the
bonding between a father and son through the use of video games. He does buckle
down to make certain points throughout the piece. 'We are at an inflection point, a
significant fraction of people's experiences are now fragmented.' Meaning that we are
at a tipping point, if we do not recover from the addiction that many of us have it will be
very difficult to come back from it. We have already begun to witness the rise of so
called internet addiction and if society doesn't change the way we go about things on a
day by day basis everything will change completely.

Matt Richtel's 'Hooked on Technology, and Paying a Price,' was published by the
New York Times a very prestigious and intellectual editorial company. The audience that
reads the New York Times is very vast. Its multiple articles are meant to cover many
topics. Who exactly was it that Matt Richtel was trying to reach out to when he wrote
this article? One of the main themes that you see throughout this article is the use of a
family to prove and make a point. I believe that through the use of the Campbell family
the author is able to relate to a lot of families that are possibly going through the same
issue as well.

Multitasking has become an issue for just about anybody who uses today's
modern technology. We all have our devices such as smartphones, gaming consoles,
desktop computers, streaming devices and we usually have three of those running at
the same time with multiple tabs open. The Myth of Multitasking is the thought that
multitasking makes us more productive where in reality studies have proven the
opposite. The author states, 'The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the
non-multitaskers at recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position. In other
words, they had trouble filtering out the blue ones ' the irrelevant information.'
Meaning that multitasking has made us less efficient at discerning what kind of
information is useful for the task at hand. Studies have also shown that multitasking has
made us become less efficient at juggling important problems, which is quite ironic
when you consider that multitasking is trying to do just that.
In conclusion the author illustrates for us the danger of the overuse of technology
and how it affects our everyday lives. He uses the two rhetorical concepts: Kairos and
stasis theory effectively and in a way that it's difficult to find holes in his arguments. The
article certainly does not represent or is relevant to most of the world's population but it
does address the rising problems that we are facing and will face in the future of the
United States.

