This is my morning routine:

-Get Up

-Make Coffee

All this takes about half hour depending on how many replies I have to make. This is the first thing I do every morning, weekday or weekend. This is what’s happening in today’s day and age as highlighted by a New York Times article.

More and more each day, individuals are being consumed by technology and social networking sites. This routine is the same for my younger siblings who get up, check Facebook, then their text messages. It’s become such a big part of our lives, we almost spend more time with these sites than we do with our own families.

There once a time at my house when our entire family would sit together for breakfast or dinner and then the news. Now we’re all scattered around the house, each person doing their own thing, all of us on some kind of social networking site. I dedicate the evenings to the news and digging my latest friend submitted content on Digg, while they’re online doing the same thing.

Online social networking sites have become such a big part of my life, I tweet about games or shows as I’m watching it on TV. Most of the time, my friends join in on the conversation. There was a time when the television was turned on all day in my house. My siblings wouldn’t put down the remote but now we’re all staring at a computer screen for hours on end.

Checking e-mail, Facebook status and messages and tweets is becoming a growing trend among Americans as the internet is reaching more people than ever before. The world flows at a faster pace than ever before. The latest news becomes old news the next day when you pick up the paper. That’s one of the reasons why Newspapers are closing shops and losing billions in advertising revenue.

The problem with this new trend is it’s become extremely difficult to give it up. No one wants to be the last to find out the news, or be the last to hear the latest celebrity gossip. We crave that knowledge and in doing so, we’ve become slaves to social networks and the internet. Will it slow down anytime in the near future? I highly doubt it. Look at what Apple and Google are doing with their mobile softwares. One day we’ll be connected to the internet every second of the day and all of our friends, as if they were right beside us. We’re almost at that stage now, almost….