"Alienating Technology" by Sarah Kerrigan

When prompted by the question, “What is life like as a teenager in 2023?” a lot comes to mind. As someone who has grown up with four older siblings with a significant age gap, I am aware that my high school experience differs from the experiences my siblings had greatly, and I find the biggest difference between our experiences could be narrowed down to one thing; phones. 

Cellphones are captivating, convenient and somewhat limitless. To carry an answer to every question in your pocket is something common for almost every student, so much so that oftentimes my peers and I may be oblivious to our surroundings due to our attention being taken by this technology. 

In this piece, I wanted to represent how alienating technology is, in its accessibility, in the ways we are drawn to it, and in some ways, how it takes away our humanity. I imagine just talking to one another is much different than how it may have been even just 10 years ago, and I think phones have a direct influence on this. Without cellphones, I full-heartedly believe the experience of high school in 2023 would be unrecognizable. I chose to represent a hallway I go down almost everyday, and to illustrate an alien grabbing a phone falling from the ceiling. This represents how accessible this technology is, how it is alienating and somewhat contains its own world within itself, and finally a small representation of just how many phones there are in a given school setting. I created this piece with colored pencils on 7x10 paper.