Matt Richtel wrote this piece for the New York Times so that he could forewarn us about the
increasing usage that technology in our homes and in our everyday lives. The author uses the
Cambell family whom are just an average American family as a personal example to enable us to
see just how much technology effects our lives, ability to maintain focus and how it affects our
brain as well. 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 that '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 authors 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 but it's also necessary to learn
how to adapt or let it consume you.
One of the main focuses in Matt Richtel article is how Mr. Campell has allowed the use of
technology to affect his life in a drastically negative way. Mr. Campell a businessman is revealed
to misuse almost every second of his day using technology, although technology is necessary at
his place of employment hes become so compulsive and erratic with his time use of it that he has
become nearly invisible to his family and is almost removed himself from their lives. Mr.
Campbell is frequently absent minded due to the amount of information that one consumes when
we are 'hooked on technology'. Matt Ritchel states that '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.' Meaning that 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. We have seen the trend of the use of technology increase
exponentially in the past decade. But this trend was predicted by Gordon E. Moore, the co-
founder of the Intel that described in a paper written in 1965 that describes accurately in which
technology increases every year. This prediction that is known as Moore's law that states that
over the history of computing hardware, processing speed and power doubles approximately
every two years and will continue to do so. This might seem like a unthreatening fact but if you
think about it if technology is so intrusive in our lives now, think about how much it will have
taken over our lives in a decade.

Although the author doesn't mention a sense for urgency he does mention the need to improve
our usage of technology so that 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 is able to show us how we all have become unable to
become unplugged. The author of the article goes on to say that days that we spend without
distractions such as email and Facebook and the constant need 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 authors urgency is easy to perceive at time by using light hearted examples about family
vacations and the bonding of 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 day by day 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 read the New York
time is very vast and its many articles are meant to touch multiple topics. But was who exactly
was it that Matt Ritchel 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 Campell 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, smartphones, gaming consoles, desktops, streaming devices etc. and we
usually run three of those 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 that '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 as well, which is quite ironic when you consider that multitasking is trying to
do just that.

The author of this article 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.

