There’s no doubt that technology has advanced at an extraordinary rate over the past 20 years, but you really have to wonder if it is stunting our growth in some areas and causing us additional stress that just didn’t exist before the technological boom.

One of the most obvious side effects of technology is the increased desire for everything to be instant. You can buy just about anything online and some products such as music and video are delivered instantly. We can pay our bills, transfer money and book tickets to a theatre production all with a few mouse clicks.

Our expectations for support, particularly technical support, are much higher than they used to be. If the person providing a service is online then we expect them to be available 24/7/365. As a programmer I know that many of my customers expect to be able to contact me any evening, public holiday or weekend and there’s no such thing as penalty rates for online service providers, programmers or web developers.

Our kids spend more time online than they do with their ‘offline’ friends. I remember when I was young I used to walk to my friends houses to see if they wanted to hang around, play some cricket or baseball or watch some TV. Nowadays just about everyone is just an SMS away. It would be interesting to compare the average distance a child would walk each week thirty years ago compared to today. It’s no wonder that obesity has become such a major problem for some kids.

Of course there is also the other side of technology. With the information that is available on the Internet, most of us can access more information in a couple of days than most people would have had available in a lifetime 40 or 50 years ago. For businesses it is much cheaper to use email or SMS than it ever was to use the landline – particularly for interstate and international calls.

It’s definitely food for thought though – the cost savings and efficiency improvements verses the stress, health and anti social aspects of technology.