Just ten years since experts predicted a rosy future for everyone who had access to the ‘information superhighway’ – as the internet was then known – people are facing ‘technology burnout’, according to new research(1).
The vast majority of British people of all ages think that their parents had easier, simpler lives and much of the stress levels in modern life are blamed on technology, with nearly two thirds of adults thinking life was once easier because people had less technology to deal with.
Even younger ‘techno-dependent’ adults (74% of whom “could not live without their mobile phone”) think technology brings excess complexity to life – over 50% of 18-24 year olds born after the technology boom of the early 1980s believe their parents had an easier lot simply because they had less technology in their lives.
“It’s interesting that the very things that were supposed to set us free are now blamed for causing us more stress,” says psychologist, Dr Linda Papadopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Counselling Psychology at the London Guildhall University . “Back in the mid 1970s one of the favourite TV programmes was The Good Life because - even then - there was a sense of wanting to get back to a simpler way of living. As the technology that was supposed to make things easier has exploded in the intervening 30 years, it seems people have become ever more stressed by the complexity of having to include more technology in their lives.”
That said, today’s gadgets have now become firmly established within the fabric of our everyday lives.
The top 10 technology revolutions we say we couldn’t live without according to research conducted for easyMobile are:
1. ATMs (cash points) 54%
2. Mobile phone 47%
3. Internet 39%
4. Email 32%
5. Text messaging 30%
6. Satellite / cable TV 28%
7. Directory enquiries 19%
8=.SatNav 16%
8=.Grocery home deliveries 16%
10.MP3/iPod 14%
(1) Research by ICM on behalf of easyMobile, March 2006.
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