Technology and moderation

I am about to present some modern-day funny lines I learned from the young. If you do not understand what I am talking about or could not even identify these terms, then I would suggest you ask the youngest member in your family to explain them to you.

Here is a list of some funny stories related to modern day video games:

“My girlfriend told me to stop playing Pokémon as it was childish. I started thrashing about and roared “You don’t have enough badges to control me!”

Q: What do you call the Nintendo Wii in France?

A: A Nintendo Yes.

“I’m a massive computer game geek, and people keep telling me to get a life. Then I thought to myself, I don’t need to get a life, I’m a gamer so I have lots of lives.”

“A zombie walks into work, and his boss tells him, “Did you get enough sleep last night? You look a bit dead this morning…””

I guess for the last one in this list, it’s more from a reality TV show than a video game.

These are now funny lines that are related to video games.

Now, let me bring you back to that old device that baby boomers and Gen X’ers still enjoy using, and that is called the “Television Set.”

“Drink Moderately.” Have you noticed or seen these words appearing in advertisements that feature alcoholic drinks? The featured words here, of course, is the derivative from the word ‘moderation.’

What does the word mean? Let me consult my online dictionaries:

Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines the word as… “avoiding extremes of behavior or expression : observing reasonable limits….calm, temperate…tending toward the mean or average amount or dimension.

Cambridge Dictionary defines it very simply as: “The quality of doing something within reasonable limits.”

And while we somehow know instinctively that anything taken to extremes would be bad for us, the word ‘moderation’ becomes more challenging as technology continues to churn out products that would make us consciously or subconsciously deviate from moderation.

Consider the following realities:

It has been said that smartphones are now appendages to our biological anatomy. It is so hard to find a person around you not holding one of momentarily putting the device somewhere within reach.

The amount of time we use it on a daily basis keeps on increasing.

We get totally anxious and nervous when we get out of the house and forgot to bring the device with us. And, in many cases, we would travel all the way back or ask somebody else to get the device for us just to calm our nerves.

Online shopping delivers the stuff we want (perhaps not what we need) and conveniently delivers to our household and gives the buyer an artificial feeling of exhilaration akin to receiving a Christmas or birthday gift upon its arrival totally forgetting that the item has been paid for by the recipient herself.

Food can be ordered through apps and they are delivered to our homes.

Social media…well…much has been said about it keeping our eyes glued and can be accessed anytime and anywhere 24/7.

Plans and bundles offered by phone companies, and apps that offer free communication tools lead us to none-stop communications with friends from all over the world.

It is now a common occurrence for me to see people walking while texting – that’s of the old days…now they have their headsets on, they face their phones and speak to their friends face to face – through the device of course.

And, of course, as in our list of funny stories; those video games – and their almost addictive behavior to gaming-- led the World Health to include “gaming disorder”, which is another term for game addiction in a draft of the international Classification of Diseases. The basis for this disorder is qualified when a person continues to play online games despite negative consequences.

But what about binge watching on “seasons” of series or movies, which together with so many other things in life is now available “on-demand?”

 Arianna Huffington is the founder of the Huffington Post and, Lord willing, I may have the chance to meet her in New York before the end of this year. She wrote an article about how she lamented how technology degrades the closeness between people in the same room. She cited how heavy social media usage has been linked to higher rates of depression, especially in the young. “Our ability to succeed in the technology-dominated workplace of the future depends, in no small measure, on our ability to — right now — take back control of our technology, and our lives,” she wrote.

The fantastic thing about social media is that it has made it possible for us to communicate and relate with people who are so far away from us and isolate and alienate the people who are beside us. Now that should not be the case.

Communicate with your kids. Develop their communication skills.

Redesign your work space so that your people learn to communicate with each other in the flesh and not just electronically. Pretty soon when AI-enabled devices become ubiquitous, the art of communication will suffer, and that would not be good for business and for life. This is also why leadership training now must include to a greater degree the development of communication skills.

Technology, of course, is a two-edged sword. Fire, being one of its earliest discovery. It can cook our food and it can also burn us. So, does technology when not used properly. Would it be possible to...use it in moderation? I honestly don’t know. I hope the experts would teach and show us how.

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