Thoughts: Technology and A Moment Of Reflecting

TECHNOLOGY AND A MOMENT OF REFLECTING

In today’s world, technology plays a vital role. Since there are so many advantages that technology offers us, it’s nothing new that technology has become an essential part of our life. Some people think that the existence of technology should be used for positive references especially for human being.. With the help of it, we are able to communicate and share information to people from around the world in seconds, we are also able to learn new things and gain knowledge. Compared to earlier days, now we surely are having better facilities with the help of technology. There’s no need to deny that we’ve gathered many benefits from the technological inventions.

Well, it actually doesn’t matter how big or small the technological inventions, but what matters lies on how some specific applications are used to define the impacts to society. For example, before there comes any help from digital pictures editors, people are doing everything manually straight from the camera, adjusting lights, adding focus etc. But years have gone by and things have improved. People are inventing various picture editing programs to help them beautify photographs, people let technology plays its role to make their job easier. 

However, despite all the fun, people are having too much ‘fun’ and it ends up to abusing the functions of it.  We’ve seen some people excessively using the picture-editing program whether it’s for fun, for business and for other particular reasons or purposes. From advertorial pictures to political campaigns, we’ve seen pictures that have gone to editing program before it actually seen to public. Even sometimes we personally cannot help it to use the editing program, because it was darn easy.

With the help of the digital technology, there are pictures of a person’s that are enhanced to look ‘perfect’ almost unreal, such as models, actor, actresses, or public figure in general. What’s worse is, by picture editing program people can create a seemingly different person by heavily editing the pictures.  While on reality, there’s no way that people will look flawless. But with the power of technology, a little touch of editing surely goes a long way. On some people, it makes them feeling envious of the unrealistic images and almost become an obsession to become ‘perfect’  just like them (by implying an unhealthy lifestyle).

In other case let’s jump to the recent issue; intimate photographs of Chairman Of KPK, Abraham Samad with “Puteri Indonesia” 2014 Pageant winner, Elvira Devinamira Wirayanti spread to public’s eyes through local press and social media. For a moment, those pictures had people believe that those were real. Turned out later there was a statement explaining the pictures were edited. Not to forget during the 9/11 accidents, there was a man posing on the top of World Trade Center building. The infamous “The Tourist Guy” claimed that the picture was taken a moment right before the twin tower attack. People didn’t know how and who started it, but when the fictitious images were shown to public, we all thought those images were real at first and some people are trying to ‘reveal’ the truth being the pictures, whether the they are real or edited. 

From what we have, we can see how powerful the technology to make people assume something that isn’t true. It’s a bit shocking to think that how technology can be troublesome and misleading in some ways. All the digital ways above on editing pictures lead people to believe that what we’ve seen in really what’s really happening, but sadly it isn’t. It’s even remotely messing out perceptions about reality and creates such misconception. The existence of technology was to help us, but on the other side, technology can also makes people instantly create such a false perception. 

When some people think it’s not a big deal, some other think it’s inappropriate because it causes confusion, humility, in rage or disappointments on people. So, it is important to be thoughtful and having the ability to understand there are risks of every action by using digital technology. Boundaries are still needed and sticking to good values on using digital technology is also remarkable, therefore we can continue to innovate better in order to create more helpful inventions in the future. What do you think about it? Since when is a picture-editing program become a moral issue? How far is too far? Let's pause for a moment in order to reflect the impacts of abusing the uses of technology. Hopefully in the future we will be more aware on using it and won't cause any harm to others.