Are you grateful for technology and the advancements?

I have never like the word "technology", now so meaningless and debased; but the development of modern telephony and the Internet has certainly made possible something inconceivable when the word was coined, I think in the 1930s if not earlier.

On the whole it has [i]so far at least [/i]proven on balance a force for good, and most of its use is constructive.

However, it has also proven too easily used for political manipulation, antisocial campaigns based on lies, and personal bullying.

Also too powerful a tool for remote businesses to build their own commercial monopolies and destroy all competition - so in the end, choice.

It use also relies on an almost complete, world-wide commercial monopoly, that of Microsoft, combined with over-reliance by governmental and commercial organisations on that one company. This has the unintended consequence of being very open to attack over international distances by people with the appropriate skills. The fall into two categories: criminal gangs (such as send me e-posts pretending to sell me a Lenor product), and government agencies.

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I fear though a future so wedded to the Internet and associated equipment such as the so-called "smart"-'phone that anyone without these will be side-lined into a very narrow, inconvenient way of life. That is as the Internet is twisted to suit not users but the few huge, mainly American, companies dominating it, and other large commercial institutions.

State services too, as we already see their customer services staff all apparently assuming "now we all live 24/7", use the latest "tech" to bank on-line, "consume" our news (or views?) and entertainments "content" from Disney and Meta dot-com, "click and collect" our groceries, allow [i]1984[/i]-esque "smart-speakers" to eavesdrop on us, etc. To quote the semi-illiterate jargon....

Some of us prefer to decide our own way of life not dominated by the W-cubed; but many have no choice either way!

You can't even easily use the Internet as an encyclopedia now, since (probably Google and Microsoft together) have blocked any search by a mass of advertising links chosen at best only by some tenuous, automatic word-match, not subject.

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I fear its future for these reasons:

- Ever-narrowing choices of goods and services and their suppliers; and ever-increasing difficulty with even simple information about day-to-day matters like doctors' appointments and train services.

- Consequent on that, use it or be considered a "non-person".

- Ever-increasing waste of money and of expensive, perfectly good equipment by the IT and telecommunications trades manipulating you into ever more expensively bloated "services"; while making the equipment ever more rapidly "obsolete" long before its genuine engineering time.

- Ever-increasing surveillance and unauthorised sales of personal information - not by the government, at least not in my country. That would not worry me: I am not a drugs smuggler or ISIS agent. Instead by commerce, led by just a few, giant US-based and increasingly now Chinese, corporations, for cynical commercial purposes.

- Ever-increasing reliance on the fundamental weakness of domination by a single engineering system, so that technical breakdown, or by state or criminal attack, could leave you incommunicado, stranded, unknown. And [i]in extremis[/i], utter havoc because too many public organisations use what is such a monopoly based on a public communications system, that the professional hackers know it to every 1 and 0.

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George Orwell's [i]1984[/i], written 50 years earlier, predicted a state aided by "tech": a two-way television in everyone's home as sole and inalienable communicator between State and Citizen.

The film version made around the time is early enough to show the TV camera as still the rotating-scanner type; and we still do not have the spy camera (unless we choose to fit one and tell Google). Otherwise, his technical prediction was uncomfortably prescient....

I am, technology has given us a lot of good things even if it comes at a price. If it werent so there would be so many good interactions with people from all over the world that I'd never have.

Is this about relationships only? If so, then technology is giving us more choices, not allowing us to distance ourselves. Technology was not required for the latter.

Generally it seems to have had a negative impact but probably more so to do with peoples inability to control their usage rather than the technology itself. I truly believe peoples technology usage should be limited as overuse tends to lead to chaos.