This Thanksgiving, I find myself to be thankful for many things, including technology. I often say that if we didn’t have technology, I wouldn’t have moved to LA from London five years ago. Keeping in contact with those I love so far away was a key point of contemplation prior to my move because I wanted to stay easily connected to them and my culture. Now, five years later, I still follow TV soap series storylines, celebrities, and trends from England. In fact, my go-to comfort shows are all British, because sometimes I like to hear the accent and words like Tesco, underground, and motorway. In my short life, I have watched technology grow and become an everyday use. I remember having to connect the family computer manually to the internet with a lead. I have seen disposable cameras become digital cameras. Which further developed into the camera on my phone I use nearly every day. There has been a huge jump in the type of technology available to us in the last decade or so. It’s crazy to think that the technology which wasn’t available ten years ago is now such a crucial part of our day-to-day lives.
The first technology to be thankful for is educational technology. We are lucky to have things like Zoom and Google Classroom which allow us students to carry on with our education, lucky to have email to communicate, and an endless list of resources that can help us with our work. Despite these amazing technologies, students, myself included, are finding it more and more difficult to stay focused and energized about class.
Most of us are falling victim to Zoom fatigue. The hours we spend on a computer in class and out of class is exhausting on our eyes and our brains. Further, these long days of staring at screens create more opportunities for students to fall behind on personal care. Things like bad eating habits, skipping exercise, and procrastinating studying are things that we have all struggled with. This is why the second technology to be appreciative of is streaming platforms.
While personal time and rest are an important part of our technological lives, I have found fitness is an increasingly more important aspect of my technological life. At the beginning of the year, being at home working all day created more opportunities for me to snack and become restless. Once I recognized this, I started using fitness apps to track my diet and exercise which has kept me from putting on the COVID-19. This is why fitness technology is another thing I’m thankful for.
From education to fitness, I am so thankful that technology has been there for us all this year. It has been difficult staying limited to our homes and a small handful of people, but the use of technology has kept us connected, entertained, educated, and healthy during this time. While all of us have been enjoying the daily battles over wifi, I think it’s fair to say that we have realised just how amazing it is to be living in the digital age.
