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Technology is a huge part of our lives. Nowadays, where we work, where we learn, how we communicate, and how we stay connected to each other are all surrounded by technology. We may not think about this when we're around these tech devices but it affects our mental health, and not always in a positive way. This article discusses how technology impacts us and our mental health, and what we can do to balance it out!

"The more he uses technology, the less he uses Braille ... technology is making the nearly 200-year-old writing system more accessible than ever. She shows off an electronic reader that's about the size of a paperback. Instead of having to lug around massive volumes of printed braille, this reader allows Deden to just sweep her fingers over little plastic nubs that rise and fall with each line of text. ... The federation estimates that today only 1 in 10 blind people can read Braille. That's down dramatically from the early 1900s."

Technology will have a massive impact on the way we learn, the way we live, and the way we work. Some believe technology will even eradicate the need to learn language at all

This article talks about the negative effects that technology can have on children, as well as what we can do to prevent these negative effects. It gives specific ways on how to help children limit technology use.

This article is about the positive and negative effects of technology on children, this talks specifically about statistics and how they can benefit and not benefit from technology use.

This article contains several data tables that show the different modes of communication and how often we use each one. Certain graphs organize data by gender, age, impact on school, and much more. Something that interested me was that our time spent on text-based technology has negatively impacted our ability to write. This article analyzes each set of data points and puts our usage of electronics into perspective, as technology has dominated the way we converse.

This article posted by UCSB speaks to the fact that technology is harming our human interaction, and we are reliant on it for many aspects of our everyday lives. The author uses several examples such as texting a friend, emailing a professor (instead of going in for help,) or missing the opportunity to meet new people. It's important to be mindful of how often one is going on a device because there is more to the world than the internet, social media, etc.

With the spread of mobile technology, it's become much easier for more people to maintain constant contact with their social networks online. And a lot of people are taking advantage of that opportunity. One indication: A recent Pew Research survey of adults in the U.S.

How technology affects how we write and speak the English language

How do you pronounce "read receipt"--the notification that pops up once the recipient of a text message has been opened? While some pronounce it as 'reed' (present tense,) others pronounce it as 'red' (past tense.) In an era full of technology, we are reading more than ever on our tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Therefore, our words are being transmitted across the world instantly. Various pronunciations occur because we learn new words from reading, rather than listening. In the end, we cannot settle for a "proper" usage of a word because pronunciation will surely continue to change with time and technology.

Long-term language change is inevitable. People need to convey a wide range of emotions or objects, and they will always need to find the words to do so. Technology may help to speed up this process, and it also allows people of all ages to be inventive and experimental, perhaps more than ever before. Only dead languages never change.

When driving, don't talk to your car - or your phone. That's the underlying message of new neuroscience published Thursday that raises new questions about the safety of voice-activated technology in many new cars. The technology, heralded by many automakers, allows consumers to interact with their phones and their cars by issuing voice commands, rather than pushing buttons on the dashboard or phone. However, research found that the most complicated voice-activated systems, and the vocal and auditory tasks associated with them, can take a motorist's mind off the road for as long as 27 seconds after he or she stops interacting with the system. Even less complex systems can leave the driver distracted for 15 seconds after a motorist disengages. See the article for an embedded .pdf of the full study. But good news: apparently listening to the radio or audiobooks don't pose much distraction.

Many languages are endangered. Braille and sign language may be next. Technological advancements have decreased demand for these once revolutionary aids.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity - even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time."

Choosing a voice has implications for design, branding or interacting with machines. A voice can change or harden how we see each other. Research suggests that users prefer a younger, female voice for their digital personal assistant. We don't just need that computerized voice to meet our expectations, said Justine Cassell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. We need computers to relate to us and put us at ease when performing a task. "We have to know that the other is enough like us that it will run our program correctly," she said. That need seems to start young. Ms. Cassell has designed an avatar of indeterminate race and gender for 5-year-olds. "The girls think it's a girl, and the boys think it's a boy," she said. "Children of color think it's of color, Caucasians think it's Caucasian." Another system Cassell built spoke in what she termed "vernacular" to African-American children, achieving better results in teaching scientific concepts than when the computer spoke in standard English. When tutoring the children in a class presentation, however, "we wanted it to practice with them in 'proper English.' Standard American English is still the code of power, so we needed to develop an agent that would train them in code switching," she said. And, of course, there are regional issues to consider when creating a robotic voice. Many companies, such as Apple, have tweaked robotic voices for localized accents and jokes.

This article is about a study of around 260 students ages 11-18 years old at a secondary school in the Midlands to determine if the increased use of technology had hindered students' ability in school. It was found that about six out of ten students copied directly from sources with over a quarter of them not realizing that it was plagiarism. The study also found that the increase use of modern technology has made more students use "text-speak" in their work at school. Text-speak is made up of shortcuts usually used when texting another person. Teachers are having a harder time understand their students' work because of the usage of text-speak, thus proving the negative impacts of the increased use of modern technology on students.

Pew Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 technologists and scholars about the forces shaping the way people interact with one another online. They asked: "In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?" The vast majority of techonolgists surveyed-81 percent of them-said they expect the tone of online discourse will either stay the same or get worse in the next decade. "Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view," Susan Etlinger, a technology industry analyst, told Pew. "The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor." Tor is software that enables people to browse and communicate online anonymously-so it's used by people who want to cover their tracks from government surveillance, those who want to access the dark web, trolls, whistleblowers, and others. The uncomfortable truth is that humans like trolling. It's easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online-and it's hard for platforms to design systems to stop them. Hard for two reasons: One, because of the "ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity," as Pew puts it. And, two, because technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for people. "Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform," said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report. "Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged."

The World Health Organisation counts 430m people as deaf or hard of hearing. Many use sign languages to communicate. If they cannot also use those languages to talk to computers, they risk being excluded from the digitisation that is taking over everyday life. Sign language poses particular issues in re: its translation to either text or speech. Some challenges include improving the machine-learning algorithms that recognise signs and their meaning and developing the best methods to interpret sign languages' distinctive grammars. The applications of such technology could improve the lives of the deaf, for example, allowing them to use their cell phones to search for directions or look up the meanings of unknown signs, without resorting to the written form of a spoken language.

Due to the increase in language-learning technology, learners of second languages can get exposure to the new language that weren't possible before, making it easier to learn a new language.

AI writers like ChatGPT can often produce work that is, at least on first glance, indistinguishable from human writing. With a simple prompt like "write an expository essay on symbolism in Heart of Darkness," ChatGPT can spit out an organized, coherent, five-paragraph essay in seconds. (See results below.) And no two essays will be identical. In some cases, help from an AI may be as acceptable as using a Google search as part of the research process. But in many cases, it will be unacceptable for classroom work. So how do teachers deal with the growing ease with which AIs can complete student homework? Turnitin, which is known for its technology used for plagiarism detection, has posted a technology preview that shows its software automatically detecting work written by an AI writer, even going so far as to show which parts of an essay were written by AI versus human and indicate where AI writing transitions into human writing.