English, technology's explosion

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Buying clothes, electronics, and other goodies once required leaving the house. Not anymore. The E-Commerce industry is doing extremely well and is expected to increase 62% by 2016. Every product is at the tip of your fingers on the internet, literally. Type in the product you are looking for into your favorite search engine and every option will appear in a well-organized list in a matter of seconds. Your time is saved! With E-commerce there is no driving in circles while looking and digging in hopes of finding what you need. Stores online offer their full line as well as use warehouses instead of store fronts—products are easy to locate and can be delivered to your door in just days. Options, options, options! Without driving from store to store the consumer can easily compare and contrast products. See who offers the best pricing and have more options to choose from. While a physical store has limited space, the same store on the internet will have full stock.

Which product is better? Side by side comparisons are readily available and easy to do. When products are placed online, they come with all the specifics, and they want you to compare them with others, know they have the best options and come back for more! Still hesitating? See reviews: because the competition is high, companies online want you to look at other consumer reviews. Good and bad reviews are on every site, not only can you see if the product is liked, you can also see the reasons behind the thumbs up or down.

The E-commerce seems to be the best way to shop but the quality of products is not ensured: is what you see reflects the real products? Of course the effect of marketing is there and the picture is more beautiful than the real one. It’s also includes hidden costs: shipping, handling, and taxes and the delay in receiving goods and the after-selling service should be taken in consideration.

As a result of the excessive use of technology, we are more and more lazy and dependent. You’re on the fence about whether or not you want to get out and do something, but then something comes over you. You start looking around at your PS3 and laptop, then realize you can have just as much fun staying in the house. To make things worse, Nintendo and Microsoft had to go ahead and release the Wii and Kinect (respectively). Thanks to these two addictive gadgets, you can go bowling, play tennis, or participate in the Olympic Games in your living room.

It’s difficult to get lost now; we’re getting closer and closer to the day when people won’t even be able to read paper maps anymore. There is already a good deal of young adults that have no idea how to navigate through their own cities without using a GPS. Being able to print out complete turn by turn directions for where you need to go pretty much killed the need for a map. You can use Google Maps on your smart phone and get voice guided turn by turn directions for free. Even people with no sense of direction can get to where they need to be with today’s technology.

Furthermore, we are so lazy to take five seconds to think about something before googling it: We have all Googled something that we were completely embarrassed we didn’t know the answer to. According to Google, “How to tie a tie” gets over 500,000 searches a month. For some reason, over 1,000 people are searching “how to boil water” and “how to boil eggs” gets over 40,000 searches per month. Google has made the process of learning how to do things extremely easy. There was once a time when if you didn’t know how to do something, you had to either: Know someone that knew how to do it or try to figure it out and mess up until you got it right.

Why struggling that much? A quick search on Google will bring up instructional YouTube videos, blog posts, and PDF’s that show you how to do anything. So much for being self-sufficient.

To sum-up, technologies’ progresses led humanity to develop a way of living characterized by speed, ease of access to many things to ensure comfort. Therefore, as explained below, this query for comfort made use dependent to technology and submit us to its negative effects. The best way to deal with the issue will be keeping a distance from these devices and its products and trying to live a natural life. If you’re the type of person that won’t change the channel because you can’t find the remote, or would rather Skype then drive to visit friends/family, technology could be making you lazy.