New Serial Killer in Town
circulation and stiff muscles. New York spine surgeon, Kenneth Hansraj, agrees that spinal damage is a natural result of chronically bending your head over electronic devices. Putting your head at 60 degrees translates to having about 60 pounds of pressure on your neck. Persistently looking your computer also put you at risk of computer vision syndrome, that’s you forgetting to blink after staring at a screen for way too long. Side effects include dry eyes and lowered concentration. Staring at something for a time doesn’t always mean that you’re building your attention span.
Notice how vine satisfies our increasingly shorter attention spans. Six seconds sound pretty extreme if you actually think about it, because we are halfway down the road of being a goldfish. Keeping it “short and sweet” is becoming a bad thing now that everything is reduced to thoughtless one-liner texts. Our diminishing memory is also attributed to our reliance on technology. I wished we still the memorized our friends’ phone numbers because now I can’t call anyone for help on a stranded road. We are the opening scene of a horror movie.
We know addiction and death go hand in hand, so technology is of course not excluded from that equation. I lightly dabbed on how technology interrupts our sleep cycles, but it’s true that melatonin secretion is essential if you still want your already limited hours of sleep. Artificial light is constantly playing tricks on our brain by preventing our pineal glands from releasing melatonin so we skip out on sleep. Just to put that into perspective, sleep deprivation leads to damaged skin, irritability, as well as leaving us more prone to cancer. In addition to melatonin, technology also resembles dopamine since it acts as a reward. Since your brain like the feeling of it, you automatically continue to do it so you get that natural high. This plays a major role in keeping us away from our living friends. Nowadays we like to joke about social isolation, but it is a serious issue if your new bestie is an electrically-powered screen.
Obesity has been the problem and punchline of American culture. Our first lady, Michelle Obama, have been an advocate for eating healthy and even started the program “Let’s Move” for the sake of promoting a healthy lifestyle for children. She even released her “Turnip For What” vine in 2014 to show support. Technology consistently undos the works of our first lady as studies show screen time predict weight gain. The last generation shamelessly blamed the TV and video games for obesity and this generation immediately points their fingers at computers and the Internet.
“I’ve been sitting on my laptop” is translated into “I don’t know how many hours have passed and now the sky is dark, so what do I do with life?” A study from Harris Interactive shows that kids between the ages of 8 and 18, on average, spend 44.5 hours per week on their computers. Therefore, I was not surprised when I read about it being the culprit for poor blood