Technology is a double edge sword. . .

The advancements in technology since my youth have been abundantly rapid and impacting. I remember playing Commadore 64 and ATARI were 1D games like PONG where the staple yet still exciting as can be. Now games have DNA, literally. Today's technology has evolved to the point that the characters you play with can have shifting personality. Mario was just happy all the time, like he had a lifetime refill of Prozac. The first cell phone I had was humongous, bulky and outright lame. The minutes were excessively expensive, so much so, that seldom did I have any to call anyone. I still had to rely on my pager and hope someone lived close enough to use their landline or that a payphone was near by (. . . and i only needed a quarter to use it!). Now phones have games, email, text messaging, video, movies, music, applications that let you track election results and stream live music, and give you access to the ever addicting Facebook application.

The advancements of technology have made life more efficient and allowed us to communicate in ways we could only imagine like we did when we watched the Jetsons (still waiting on that flying car express way . . . that would make the commute to Hoffman from Bronzeville a breeze).


However, all our technological advancements have also acted as a crutch for many of the things that grew our abilities and skill sets. Take text messaging as an example. My father used to make me write letters to my aunts and uncles. They needed to be grammatically correct and he required they used more complex words other than that which I used in my everyday verbiage. It permitted me to grow my vocabulary and become better at the use of the English language. Of course, I didn't know all this at the time, it was actually quite frustrating. But it was a less expensive way of talking to extended family as long distance calls at the time were still very costly. Now, I text my uncles and aunts, using shorthand LOL's and OMG's and BRB's. Technology has actually retracted some of my ability to use the English language in exchange for acronyms! And despite the fact that mobile to mobile minutes exist and I don't know of a cell phone that doesn't have free long distance, I still, for the sake of time, communicate in short hand text.

Technology has even ripped us of the Dewey decimal system. Depending on your age, you may not even know who or what that is. That's because who goes to library's anymore. Even when I was in college, I went to the library to get a quite place to study. I didn't need books because the entire campus was on wi-fi and all my research was done on the Internet. And even if I did need a book, i would just download it electronically. I haven't stepped foot inside a library since college. And although the Internet provides immediate access to information and for that matter, the world, it has reduced the amount of time we spend reading. Young people can Google for entire research papers and teachers have to be just as keen in order to catch the plagiarism which is probably rampant in today's schools.

Technology has even taken away our ability to count. Try this. . . the next time you are ordering food and run across a automated change machine, challenge the order taker to a test. Give them a $20 bill and tell them if they can tell you, within 8 seconds, the amount of change they should get back, you'll let them have the change. You probably won't lose a dime. And chances are, you have become so trusting in the machines and techonoloy that have been implemented to "make our lives easier" that you could get shorted change every time and never notice. We have become so reliant on these tools that we never question them.

Technology in all it's brilliance has handicapped our society. And there's no promising outlook for it getting any better.

This message brought to you from my IPhone.