Can We Live Without Computers?

Did you know that 84% of all Singapore households own at least one computer? Known as an electronic device for storing and processing data, it has certainly become an important part of most people’s daily lives. There is a large range of actions that can be performed with a computer, with different actions catered for different people, but suitable for almost everybody. Hence, the computer is globally popular. As computers continue to increase in popularity, its invention has led to many technological advances and has opened many new windows, and modernization has drastically increased one’s reliance on it. However, one question bogging everyone’s mind is, can we live without it now? My view is that that our world is now too dependant on computers, hence we cannot live without it.

Without a doubt, computers have are still popular because they are convenient. They have greatly improved our standard of living, as it reduces many tasks to just a mouse click away. Computers, together with the Internet, help to save time, energy, and resources. For example, it provides the luxury of email. Through email, one does not have to handwrite letters or reports, and the message no longer has to go through “snail mail”, or involve a post office or a postman. It can be delivered and read within seconds of sending, even if the recipient is at the other end of the globe! This decreases the time, resources and energy needed. Other luxuries include finding travel directions, booking holidays or looking for recipes. One has no need to hustle to do these, and can instead simply look it up on the computer. All these contribute to how the computer has made burdensome tasks convenient. Due to the ever-increasing improvements made of the easily accessible computer, modern society has become very dependant on them, becoming fast-paced and cannot afford the time that would be wasted, should there be no computers. Hence, to ensure that modern society does not collapse, the convenience a computer provides cannot be forfeited.

It is interesting that computers are heavily relied on for communication purposes. Computers are popular because they are known to have broken communication barriers all over the world. An example is social media. Nowadays, social media, such as “Facebook”, “Twitter” and “Tumblr” have taken the virtual world by storm. Through these, people can connect with distant relatives, friends, and even strangers without having to actually meet face to face. It has made communicating with them so much easier. The only requirement is for both parties to have access to a computer, and they are able to instantly chat with each other, even if they are very far apart from the other party. It has empowered us to be able to see the outside world without leaving the comfort of our homes, sparing us the need to go through slow communications of before. It has expanded our network greatly, enabling us to know more people, gain more knowledge, and improve relationships with distant people. Additionally, it has made news a click away. One can be easily updated on the latest news, and makes helps to make us well-informed of current affairs. Therefore, without computers, communication would be difficult, and almost impossible to conjure up with the outside world. With computers, communication becomes integrated into our lives.

There are people who believe that we can live without computers, as proven by our forefathers who had lived successfully to a certain extent without such computers to aid them in life. While this is true and indeed proven, it is important to note that the world we live in now is much more advanced compared to the world of our forefathers. In the past, there were no such things like electricity or even advanced machinery, and computers were, at most, no more then a figment of imagination. However, modernization has made the role of computers an important one, and hence the idea that we could live without the means we have now is clearly out of the question. Our society has changed, and so has the needs of the generation.

Computers have become a very basic demand of this generation, and living without it is almost unimaginable. There are many reasons why this is so, but mainly, it is crucial to aid in convenience for a more productive system, and also to aid in communications around the world, to meet the needs of a changing world, one different from the era of which computers did not exist. Computers should be integrated correctly into our lives, and if done so, will prove to be beneficial and advantageous to us.