Over 89% of Americans admit to checking their phone within the first 10 minutes of waking up, according to a 2024 study done by Reviews.com.
The same study shows that the average American looks at their phone over 205 times a day. That’s a glance every five minutes.
Technology hasn’t just become ingrained into our daily habits, but also our identities, our livelihoods and the collective cultural fabric.
While the exponential growth of technology has greatly benefited society, allowing for more ease in our lives and more access to opportunities and knowledge across the globe, there are also some serious concerns about the speed at which we are adapting to it as a species, and the way we are building systems and infrastructures that rely solely on its reliability.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that began late in the evening of Oct. 19 and lasted over 15 hours into Oct. 20 was a forced, collective pause that revealed the fragility and holes in the relationship between humans and technology, starkly highlighting human dependence.
AWS offers storage space and database management, saving companies from having to look after their own computing needs and the costly creation of making their own clouds.
HG Insights, an AI-run revenue growth tracking company, calculated that over 4.19 million companies rely on AWS to function, meaning the effects of the outage were far-reaching.
It didn’t just bring down major American favorites like Snapchat, Venmo, Netflix, Starbucks Canva and Reddit. It had more serious implications for systems like hospitals and airlines that lost critical communication services, most of which were forced to shut down entirely.
AWS said the outage was caused by a defect within the service’s automated domain name system (DNS) which works to translate website names into machine-readable IP addresses.
Cybercube, a cyber risk analytics provider, estimates the financial loss of the outage to be between $38 million and $581 million.
Major corporations weren’t the only ones affected by the outage. Cuesta College professors and students also experienced the impacts.
“I was creating a new Canvas page Sunday night and kept trying to save it over and over, before deciding there wasn’t anything else I could do,” Cuesta Computer Science Professor Tafadzwa Dube said. “When I woke up around 5 a.m. I learned about the outage, but had no way of communicating with my students outside of the Canvas platform.”
Instructure, the site that hosts Cuesta’s Canvas platform, and is used by over 40% of schools nationwide, was down during the outage.
It was a jarring day for students as well.
Having no access to the portal that houses all of your work as a student was a very vulnerable feeling. One that makes you reflect on your timeliness, on your study habits, on your relationships with your professors, thinking, “maybe waiting until the final hour to take that quiz or turn in that assignment truly isn’t best practice for me.”
However, having no communication line with professors felt even scarier. In such a unique event, you are looking for direction, wondering what to do, what is expected of you, and how to continue being a thoughtful and hard-working student. The shutdown felt wholly out of our control, and knowing even the Cuesta campus IT and computer science masterminds couldn’t assist was an unsettling feeling.
“It is a known thing in computer science: if you rely on a central system and that system fails, everything else fails,” Dube said.
Dube’s research background is in the field of human-computer interaction, which studies how humans interact with computers, working to make it as easy as possible for groups of people throughout the world to have access to technology that aids in their unique lives.
While Dube is a firm believer in the power of technology and the way it can create equity and opportunity across the globe, the outage reinforced his principles as a professor who sees the importance of prioritizing face-to-face interaction and pen and paper in his classes.
“I tell my students this: don’t rely solely on technology,” Dube said. “You need your skills, you need your creativity. If you just say to ChatGPT, ‘create this design for me,’ you’ll eventually forget how to be creative yourself, and the world needs your creativity.”
Cuesta College Anthropology Professor Lise Mifsud shared a similar testament when reflecting on worries for her own students. “If you rely on [technology] for too long, then decide you want to go back, there is nothing to go back to,” she said. “You’ve lost those skills. You’ve lost those stories.”
Mifsud highlighted the loss of history and cultural knowledge that coincided with the introduction of technology to human life.
“It’s not that I want to go back to a time where I had to gather my own food – those times were also very difficult and it’s easy for us to romanticize them now – but there was a real loss of cultural identity in the process of technological modernization,” Mifsud said.
So that begs the question: is it possible to have both?
Can we accept the ease, the connectivity, the opportunities and knowledge that technology offers to our lives while also slowing down enough to recognize the potential for harm in our often blind acceptance of it?
Can we acknowledge that we are now dependent on infrastructures that can collapse due to a computer defect, and work to re-adjust?
Maybe the path to creating a more solid relationship with technology isn’t found in the extremes, like writing it off completely, but instead is found in history.
“Every time there is a new technology, what you see throughout human history is a choice. Either they choose to use all of it, use some of it, or decide it’s not for them,” Mifsud said. “You don’t have to adopt 100% of it. You can pick and choose what works for you.”
