I'd be curious to know which are the problems that technology solves, because I'm actually of the opposite opinion - technology is the answer to all the wrong problems.
Starvation (better agriculture, distribution, storage)
Pathogens and illness (medicine)
Environmental hazards (heating, shelter)
Lack of human contact (transportation + communication)
Censorship (distributed networks)
Entertainment (media creation, reproduction, storage)
I'll take a world full of pop-up adds, viral marketing videos and spam email over a world in which my parents both died of Malaria in their 30's and I can barely get enough clean water to live on in my dirt-brick house.
I had a problem keeping in touch with my extended family, Facebook has made this much easier.
I used to have issues with loosing touch with old friends (even ones you make a moderate effort to keep in touch with can become unreachable if you and they both move frequently), facebook helps.
Getting pictures of the kids distributed frequently without digital technology would have been difficult. Email made it substantially easier. Facebook makes it very easy.
I used to have a hard time finding resources for the game Go. Services like DragonGoServer let me play online and Google+ lets me find and talk to other Go enthusiasts.
1- Since dropping from College, I decided to change friends. Facebook allowed me to get back in touch with older high school friends and also find new friends in the same area as me.
2- The Internet allowed me to work remotely to foreign companies. Skype, Github, basecamp... manages my projects and workflow. These technologies made it possible that I make a very good online income while staying at home.
3- I bought a Nikon D5100 the last week. I'm taking photos of everyday life and events, re-touching them and saving them (not in Facebook, just plain JPEG in computer) for the future as memories.
4- My SmartPhone, Tablet, and TV do a lot for me everyday. (productivity, communication, learning, and entertainment)
The issue is not with technology, but with using it. Some BigCorp makes addictive technologies to boost their earnings (online/social videos games). I play video games, but I'm a light player. Few hours a week.
My view is that technology is power and power itself is neither good nor bad, it’s neutral. Power just increases the stakes, how the cards get dealt is the important point. As a society we spend a lot of time thinking about who has what power because we know what happens when you get it wrong. But, strangely, we don’t afford technology the same consideration. What happens instead is that whichever technology is just the right mix of popular and profitable proliferates while all others die. The implication of this belief is twofold:
* there are a whole load of great technologies with no means of generating profit that we will never benefit from
* there are a whole load of awful technologies that are profitable that have a negative effect on society that stick around.
I (totally open-mindedly) wonder if that's partially because our elderly are getting older? We're getting better at keeping people alive after their minds have lost their edge.
I am 29 years old, certainly not a teenager anymore, but I am also without doubt not old. That we even have to ask ourselves this question goes to show there's something really fucked up about our world, probably because we are losing respect for the elderly.
I love technology and I think it's the answer to most of our problems, but its perseverance also scares me. That teenagers embrace it more than I do, that's only because teenagers are by definition raw and stupid, lacking the experience to foresee long-term problems ahead.
When I was in highschool I used to spend hours playing games such as Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake 2 and Counter Strike. I was doing that instead of going out to play soccer or to have barbecues with friends. I was logging frequently to local IRC channels, instead of going to the beach. Now I regret waisting my time in highschool.
It's also easy for me to see how intense Facebook usage is actually removing friends from my life. That's because I don't have the curiosity necessary to see how friends are doing, since I find out from their Facebook stream, so one big incentive for asking them out simply disappears. And it is great that with Facebook I got connected to many primary school colleagues, but once past the thrill of seeing how they look like, I simply don't care anymore, as those people are actually strangers to me.
You're definitely over-thinking it ... as we grow older, we start realizing that the important things in life are the same as ever: sex, good food, family, friends, building stuff, earning money, living comfortably, going out, relaxing on a beach somewhere with a tequila, etc... anything that distracts us from doing those and we start seeing it as dangerous to our mental health.
E.g. I love my smartphone, I love how I receive my emails on it, but at night when I'm home with my son or on weekends when I'm taking walks in the park, I turn it off with no regrets.