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Sunday, March 20, 2011

The Smarter the Phone, the Dumber the User

Throughout our class discussions, one of our main themes has been the reliance of our society on technology. Since the industrial revolution, technology has developed at an extremely fast rate. And with this, our society has built our existance around it, but is it beginning to be too much?

Today, many adults are the owners of smart phones. "Smart" phones, loosely defined as phone that offers advanced computing abilities, are used as tools to simply daily functions. With features like internet capabilities, gps, email, and facetime/video functions smart phones give enough uses that it simplifies many life tasks. Could this also be endangering our forms of communication, as well as our processing of information?

For me, I find some of the applications available on smart phones intimidating. Step by step GPS, Barcode scanners, and location trackers are just some of many smart phone options that do things I would never think of having right at my fingertips. With this being available, has our reliance on technology become too strong? For example, what happened to map reading skills? Will the next generation of people in our society know how to work a compass? Will paper maps become obsolete?

This reliance of technology could endanger the simple traits we have developed throughout our evolution as the human race. Innate senses we have relied on for hundreds of thousands of years are being unused due to our every expanding range of technology at our fingertips. As I mentioned in a previous blog, many people in todays society avoid face to face interaction at all costs. Purchases, and tasks such as banking, schooling, and business meetings are taking place through technology at an ever increasing rate, affecting the face to face interaction that the human social system thrives on. With new technology such as video phone capabilities in apple products, skype, and youtube, the face to face interaction has developed onto a less tangible level. With this in mind, how will our social world be changed within the next generation? Will visiting in person become a thing of the past? Only time will tell.

1 comment:

  1. It has been postulated in this class that our recent technological advancements give us a false sense of freedom and in fact make us that much more dependent on electrical devices. However, I don't think that many people would be willing to part with their cell phones, laptops, and gps. These devices have no doubt made life easier and there is no question that people rely on them far to much. However, the benefits of having this technology have at least for now outweighed the costs in terms of global connectivity, the exponential spread of information, and its use as an invaluable research tool. What we must understand is that we are the ones inventing this new technology and therein lies our role. It is the human race that decides whether innovations are good/bad, practical/impractical, or safe/unsafe for society. So the thing to keep in mind is that we our responsible for past and future technological endeavors. As long as that awareness is upheld and we do not become ignorant, our future should not look so bleak.

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