YOU'VE ALL HEARD tales of travelers who got stuck on unnavigable back roads or who ended up hundreds of miles off course after blindly following the directions on their global positioning systems. Their unquestioning reliance on technology negated the need to look at actual “ye olde mappes,” or heed roadside warnings.
I yearned for a map at times during my college road trip this past summer. (Unfortunately the maps were stuck in the trunk in a very un-get-at-able spot.) At any given moment I, with the assistance of Maggie (our somewhat-trusty Magellan GPS), could pinpoint my exact coordinates on earth. Sadly, unless I paid attention, I was not always entirely certain which state I was in.
Today in our society, technology is slowing enabling us to use our own skills, while we replace them with cellular devices, PDA's, and computers. We no longer have to use our brain and memory skills to memorize or organize ourselves, everything is becoming more and more automated and making us more unaware of how much we don't use our given brain power.
GPS navigation, like any other technology, is quite reliable, so it is easy for us to let our guard down — to let it do all the thinking for us. Sometimes we may lose something in the process. Who still plans a route or bothers to memorize a phone number?
"I just got the new Android Verizon phone, and it has GPS and text messaging and all that stuff," says Hope Wilton, a sophomore at LBCC studying nursing.
"I'm in a field where it takes a lot of memorizing material and I've always had a good memory, I never really needed some technological device to help with remembering numbers and stuff," said Wilton.
In elementary school I knew my friends’ phone numbers, addresses, and even birthdays off by heart. Apart from a few emergency numbers I no longer make an effort — and why should I? It is right there on my phone.
"Today's generation is so funny to watch sometimes," said Joy Elrich, a psychology major at Oregon State University, "I walk by these groups of people, not just teenagers anymore, people in general, and everyone is on their cell phones texting or playing games."
"No one talks anymore, everyone is so focused on their phones that no one talks or have conversations face to face anymore," said Summer Veit, a computer science major at OSU.
Memorizing this type of information is not really terribly important. The simple fact of memorization, however, is, and any university student can tell you that there is plenty of that going on in our daily lives.
Apparently old classics like “War and Peace” have become challenging reading because the Internet has dumbed us down. Reading with concentration and contemplation is no longer possible. The Internet seems to have weaned us from that.
Technology and its concurrent ills are more a symptom of the world we live in than a cause of the “decline.” Sure, we rapidly navigate through pages and “randomly” follow links from topic to topic (down the rabbit hole to subjects we would never have dreamt of reading about).
Patricia Hastings is a resident in Benton County and has noticed the consumption our society makes when it comes to technology.
"My niece knows more about the cell phones and GPS systems and fancy televisions than I could ever dream of," said Hastings, "it's just crazy how fast technology progresses each and every year, I gave up trying to keep up."
It’s inevitable that our reading and thinking styles will not be the same as those of readers who lived in an isolated, slow, and less complicated world. Having grown up with the Internet we (my generation) are capable of a “skimming Internet” style of reading as well as “deep 'War and Peace'” style of reading.
How many readers from the previous generation can say they read 700-page novels nonstop in their preteens? Being comfortable with both big fat books and the Internet, we actually end up reading more than previous generations.
Technology is a benefit to curious people, since they have tremendous resources at their disposal. People who are too lazy to think will always end up doing something odd or lazy, and technology should not be blamed for it.
At a glance:
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http://www.thomascrampton.com/internet/debate-the-internet-is-making-us-stupid/
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/07/google-making-us-stupid-and-smart-same-time/40007/
http://www.blubb.org/2009/1/26/new-technology-make-us-unhappy-and-stupid
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