How have computers changed our everyday lives?

Our lives are entirely determined by computers and internet. Sciences, medical treatment,
education, transport, economics, financial life, information technology….. can’t exist without them. If
they failed to function for some reasons even for a short time, there would be serious confusion
(komoly zűrzavar) in the world. So we depend on them. And it is true for our personal life too. They
have become very important in our everyday lives too. We mainly use them for communication,
looking for information, entertainment and arranging our everyday affairs (dolog, ügy).

Internet and computers have opened a wide range of communication facilities: e-mails, chat
channels, community web pages and so on (etc.). Traditional methods, like ordinary letters,
telephone calls became the things of the past. They are really very excellent as they are very fast
easy, they don’t know geographical distances (távolság) and practically cost nothing. However they
are not just positive. We often use them instead of face to face communication, so we don’t meet
our friends, don’t speak to each other, don’t share our thoughts or opinions with each other as short
messages are not suitable (alkalmas) for it. For a lot of people it is unpleasant to have an eye contact
when they communicate or they don’t dare (mer) to say the things that they tell their friends on the
net freely. In addition, it is true that we can get in touch with anybody but at the same time we are
also accessible by anybody at all the time. Chat channels and mobile phones don’t leave us alone
(nem hagy békén) and we really have to be careful as our lives are “open books” for everybody so we
hardly have any privacy.

They also have brought a lot of advantages in connection with getting information. We just type the
key words in the search engine and after a single click a long list of web pages appear and we just
have to decide which is the relevant (megfelelő) for our question. Here comes the first problem, that
it is not easy at all to choose the best link for us. It’s easy to get lost among a lot of unnecessary
pieces of information. And of course, the information on the net are not checked, anybody can
upload anything. So it is easy to be misled (félrevezetett ). We get everything ‘ready’ so we don’t
have to think, just simply copy everything. We don’t read real books so our imagination have become
poorer.

They have also made a wide range of entertainment available for anybody. If we have internet
connection, we can enjoy all free time activities? cinema, theatre, concerts, learning new skills,
exhibitions, seeing new places ….. as everything can be downloaded from the net. So we can bring
endless ways of entertainment into our rooms. However people have forgotten that entertainment is
a social activity shared by some other people. We are getting more and more lonely and couch
potatoes (=very lazy, passive). And we don’t want to enjoy real things we make ourselves satisfied
with the copy of reality.

Internet saves us a lot of time and energy in connection with the affairs of everyday life, we can do
shopping, banking, holiday reservations, ticket purchase (jegyvásárlás), university application
(egyetemi jelentkezés) etc. The list is getting longer and longer from day to day. We can do them
when we have time and mood (hangulat) for them.

All in all computers and the net have changed our reality and whether we want or not they have also
changed human personality.