Technology gets a bad rap.

You wouldn’t think so – obviously, we all love it – but in a way it does.

You can’t really go a day anymore without encountering a book, article or person spewing some variation of the following: “Oh, these days, everyone’s just so plugged in to their laptops/iPods/iPads/iPhones/Kindles/BlackBerrys/etc,” always with a tone that combines whininess with nostalgia.

Sometimes it’s in the context of promoting physical activity, face-to-face interaction, getting out into nature, ink-and-paper books, live music or any number of other virtuous things. Sometimes it’s in an article about some brave soul who has eschewed Facebook, email or the entire Internet (as a 2010 Slate.com series described). Sometimes it’s embedded in smug pieces with titles like “Why I Don’t Have a Smartphone” or “Why I Don’t Text My Boyfriend.”

These lamentations annoy me because I read them, accurately or otherwise, as attempts to shift responsibility for running our own lives off ourselves and onto the technology that we willingly invent, purchase and use.

In other words, it’s not that I can’t be bothered to spend time with my family. It’s that the evil Apple device prevents me from doing so.

Of course, I exaggerate. Most people don’t really feel like they can’t control their technological activities (although people who suffer from porn addiction are a notable exception). But I do get the sense that gadgets receive an unfair amount of blame.

For instance, people often choose to cut themselves off from technology, at least temporarily or partially, rather than learn how to achieve some sort of balance in their use thereof. What else explains the preponderance of browser extensions with names like LeechBlock and SurfControl, which block “time-wasting” websites or programs?

But Facebook doesn’t waste your time. You waste your time. And if the only thing preventing you from typing www.facebook.com in the address bar is a browser add-on, you’re not actually learning to control your urges.

I do not disagree with the idea that technology can have negative consequences as well as positive ones. However, I don’t believe there’s anything special about today’s technology that causes it to sap all of our attention. As with most social trends and problems, it’s likely that what’s going on here is much more complex.

For instance, everyone loves to bemoan the fact that people now communicate mostly through technology. There’s the old cliche about texting or IMing someone who’s just in the next room – or in the same room – and the preponderance of college students who use Facebook to run their entire social lives.

But what’s really happening here? Could it be that the expectation for young people to go away to college, move frequently and put off making permanent bonds with others until later is driving the increased emphasis on digital communication? Could it be that most people never learn effective communication skills and thus feel more comfortable talking to others from behind a screen? Or perhaps that technology takes away the fear of rejection that people face when they try to invite someone to hang out in person or come up and engage them in conversation?

Maybe technology is simply the medium through which pre-existing problems in our culture and our psychology are being revealed.

For instance, everyone hates the nasty trolls who seem to inhabit every website with open commenting. However, the Internet and the anonymity it provides do not cause trolling – they simply allow it. What probably do cause it are boredom, frustration and a general inability to empathize and care for people you cannot see or even imagine. And those are problems that reside within ourselves, not within the technology we’ve constructed.

Technology makes an easy target. It’s new, it’s hard to understand and it’s changing our culture faster than we can churn out books and articles that analyze it.

But it bothers me that the act of choosing to disconnect from technology has acquired a moral value. We complain about technology rather than some of the larger, deeper problems with our culture.

Those problems are much harder to tease out and analyze. It’s easier to just write a piece blaming everything on iPhones.

But gadgets come and go. Culture usually does not.

Miriam Mogilevsky is a Weinberg junior. She can be reached at [email protected]

All opinions expressed in this column are solely the opinions of the columnist and do not reflect the views of The Daily Northwestern. If you would like to respond to the column, you may comment below, email the columnist or submit a 300-word letter to the editor to [email protected].