Neema Moin Afshar

AP Lang
Ms. Vahle/ Ms. Fjetland
26 April 2014
Synthesis Essay Rough Draft
Throughout society the vital role of technology has increased especially in the past half a
century and this attachment to technology has not necessarily been a positive influence on
society. Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death criticizes the evolving addiction
and dependency people have towards technology in America. While the advancement of
technology has created faster and more effective was of communication such as the T.V and
social media, these new methods have engrossed our entire train of thought, brainwashed,
Americas society into a society in which entertainment is our only means of obtaining
information.
The television has served as one of the most important and essential inventions of the
technological era. It has been the T.V that has allowed for information of all sorts to be
transferred and obtained through seemingly no hassle and effort. It has allowed for complicating
concepts that used to be only learnt through reading to be obtained through simple visual
programs. However positive this advancement in technology may be the truth of the matter is
that the American society has become too engrossed in receiving information through the T.V
and this dependency has made for the American society to be less active in learning and rather
choose to be passive by-standers who just watch and allow for the information to be hurled at

them in great amounts, incomprehensible information. In the Argument against TV Corbett

concludes that The television audience is divided into two categories: passive and
interpretivePassive viewers are prone to resembling zombies after a good while and will exit
their experience getting nothing more than wasted time (Source C). Not only does the T.V make
us, the viewers, less mentally active when receiving this information but it also sends us more
information than is easily comprehended in that small duration of time. James Poniewozik points
out in his article in Times Magazine titled The tick, tick, tick of the Times. After 9/11, the shock
wore off. But the news ticker kept the cables pulse pounding that the ticker was a way of
offering new newsIt became not just a tool but a symbol. It was a message in itself, a constant
prod, an emblem of a media era of constant crisis mode and steady overstimulation(source
D). The news ticker is only a single example of how the television offers us more information
that will overstimulate our brains and at the end leave us with no new information obtained.
Although the television has these inherent flaws, it has not flustered in becoming one of the most
popular forms of technology. The popularity of the T.V has grown so much that the James
Poniewozik claims that the American house has been T.V (Source D). Not only has the
television dominated the American household but the percentage of televisions in the average
American household has grown greatly in the past half a century. As Robert Puntam observes in
his book The Language of Composition that the fraction of 6th graders with a T.V in their room
has increased from six percent in 1970 to seventy seven percent in 1999 (Source I). The craze of
the T.V and its major success has not only made it a stable in the American society but has also
led to the creation of an even faster and more personal way of transferring information to other
people, the creation of social media.

Social media is one of the newest members on the scene of technological addiction, but it
isnt just one of the newest but has proven to be one of the most addicting forms of
communication. This simple way of allowing your thoughts or plans to be told to everyone a
person knows allows for us to relay information, information about anything, to millions with
seconds and just like the television this information does not stay with. It also has a side-effect of
making the users in contrast less sociable as it does nothing more than keep us indoors and
preoccupied with an alternative reality (Source D). Social media has also become one of the
most time consuming pastimes that the American society has been engrossed with. As Dalton
Conley claims in her Times article that average children ages eight to eighteen spend seven
hours and 38 minutes a day using entertainment media (Source E). But this new addiction not
only decreases the amount of time that we have to truly obtain information, it also makes the
American society less aware of true and useful information such as scientific outbreaks or
political advancements and rather switches out that information for drama as Poniewozik notes
in his other Time article titled Campaign 08: The Medias 24-minute News Cycle.
Ultimately all of the advancements in technology, especially those regarding social media
and entertainment, are disastrous to our society as they come to produce an alternative reality in
which we become more engrossed.