Advanced Essay #1

With this piece, I wanted to first connect to my own childhood and show how I grew up as a reference. I then connected the piece to a memory of visiting the Titanic museum where I first realized all of the changes in how people are being raised with technology and the impact it is having. I then went into my analysis and explained all of the negative impacts I am seeing on my own brother who is struggling to detach from technology. I can see it is taking over our society and throughout the piece I want to show how we are losing morals by doing so and how apprehensive I am about technology growing. I am proud of the way I told the stories, because I feel like I pushed myself to use a lot of descriptive language to make my story more compelling. In the future, I would want to make it a bit shorter so that I can really work on getting my point across.

This is it. Now is your chance. There it is. There’s the aisle. “Mommy…”, I said. “Yes Emily.”, my mother responded fully expectant of the next few words to jump off of my lips. “Can I get a Barbie?”, I asked as sweetly as I possibly could with a menacing little smile. “How many dolls do you already have”, my mom said matter-of-factly. “Not that many! And I don’t have any with a sparkly dress like this one. Pleaseeeeee”, I begged. Once we got home, I wildly searched through the matching plastic bags waiting until I found the doll, introducing her to the rest of my collection. I would sit in my room with the box of barbies for hours, talking to myself acting as each different girl. My mind would never tire of moving the plastic people around, creating scene after scene. I could keep myself occupied and simply change their outfits to inspire a new plot. Creativity was a constant flow through my veins just like any other child of my generation. We didn’t rely on anyone I didn’t realize just how much the times have changed until I stepped back and saw how my siblings have been raised. Pieces of the changes I see in them have been left as bread crumbs for me to discover. I found the bread as it all suddenly hit me. This past summer, my family flew to Ireland to visit my relatives. A new exciting experience that was first on our list was the Titanic museum. As soon as I stepped through the boat-shaped glass building, I was transfixed on each artifact hanging on the walls. I read every board to drown myself in the stories of the great tragedy. As we walked through each room and each exhibit, we reached a darker room. As I walked through, there were transcripts of the final communication with the passengers of the ship. There was one worker who stayed in the engineering room to communicate with the other ship sent to help rescue them. “Come quickly. Please hurry. CQD(the old fashion version of “SOS”)”, the worker sent in morse code. “We are on the way”, the ship sent back. Moments later, the worker would send another message. “Please come quickly. The boilers are almost filled. There is not much time. CQD”, the worker said. “We are coming as quickly as we can”, the ship responded. “The ship is sinking quickly. CQ————(radio silence)”. That was the final transmission ever sent from the Titanic. I stopped as I read, chills rolled down my spine and each hair stood up on end. Each dead body had a name, a family, a story. With each word I read, I felt myself growing and learning. I was so in touch with life in this moment. I walked through the exhibit with a heavy heart and a million thoughts buzzing around in my head. I looked around at everyone else walking through, wondering if they felt the way I did. I was met with blank faces. My eyes darted around the room until they finally landed on two boys running through the exhibit with their eyes locked on their bright iPhones. They rushed past each picture, artifact, and piece of history and stood by the stairs never glancing up from the technology. Every ounce of blood in my body began to boil. One of them was my own brother. I was absolutely speechless. The fact that my twelve year old brother had the audacity to breeze by a hundred years worth of history like they were nothing but scrawny morsels of words strung together limply, and had dried up without a single meaning to them. At first, I was tempted to scream at my brother, because he knew better than to disrespect everything this museum, and humanity, stood for. Or did he? My brother was only a small window I looked through to view the larger issue at hand: the new generation. They are being raised in the age of technological advances, which seems to be slowly consuming them. Their childhood is being stripped down the nothingness. Barbie dolls are being replaced with iPads. Creativity replaced with Netflix, real life replaced with artificial conceptions. My brother couldn’t disconnect from his phone for twenty minutes to learn about a real event and discover. He was so ignorant to everything around him, much like millions of others in society. I grew up aware of my surroundings and valuing people and my creativity, while he is growing up in a world where Facebook friends he’s never met are more important. I didn’t have pointless Apps to absorb hours of my life, instead I interacted with others and the world around me to expand and teach myself tools I would need growing up. My brother is missing out on this, and has already surpassed his window of creative childhood. It is sad to watch him reach for his Xbox controller instead of a book, or a soccer ball. Social media and these technologies have become artificial priorities and are taking over. Supposedly we are gaining more from technology, but I see it eating away at the youth. There is nothing to do but sit back as the barbies are thrown away and the iPhones take over.

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