A Generation of Zombies

It's almost 2 o'clock in the morning. Your eyes are getting heavy, constantly yawning every minute or so. You have class early the next morning, and you know you should be sleeping. But you just can't. It's hard to let go of the mouse, hard to stop typing, hard to turn your gaze outside of the computer screen. It's like the sight of anything else other than the webpage you've been browsing is painful. You just can't do it. You just can't stay away from your computer. You'd rather sacrifice sleep than let go.

If this scene seems familiar to you, then you belong to a big chunk of the population who would rather watch TV or play with their gadgets than sleep. A study released indicated that people in the United States are losing sleep over their gadgets. All but five percent of people surveyed as part of a National Sleep Foundation poll said they played videogames, watched television, or used smartphones or laptop computers in the hour before going to bed.

“Over the last 50 years, we've seen how television viewing has grown to be a near constant before bed, and now we are seeing new information technologies such as laptops, cell phones, videogames and music devices rapidly gaining the same status," said Lauren Hale of Stony Brook University Medical Center.

The higher use of these potentially more sleep-disruptive technologies among younger generations may have serious consequences for physical health, cognitive development and other measures of wellbeing." (http://technology.inquirer.net/infotech/infotech/view/20110308-324175/Gadgets-ruining-peoples-sleep--study, last accessed at 10 March 2011).

It seems like in the United States, more and more people are compromising sleep in order to spend a few more minutes, or even hours, playing and using their gadgets. I would not be surprised if this same trend is happening in the Philippines. At this day and age, with manufacturers finding new ways to capture the people's attention, there are now a myriad of distractions that force people to sacrifice what used to be perceived as life's essentials. But with the advent of technology, priorities are realigned and people's habits are changed.

As much as we acknowledge the positive ramifications of technology to the lives of billions of people, we should also acknowledge the social costs associated with them. I do not think, however, that it should deter us from advancing developments in technology. Instead, we should find ways to deal and to adjust, lest we becomes a new generation of sleep-deprived zombies.

JERIC CRUZ blog 16