Consider the following story.
My brother (a retired engineer) has a friend named Tom, who is also a retired engineer. Tom and my brother share an odd and nerdy interest in inks and old-style fountain pens, and they frequently hand write letters to relatives.
Recently Tom emailed an incident to my brother, as follows:
"Some time ago, I went in to a 'big box' electronics store looking to get info on the latest and greatest PC model available. A young lad approached me and offered assistance. I explained that I hadn't kept up with the latest models and needed some guidance. He was well-groomed and well-spoken and presented a professional customer service attitude.
"Explaining the latest and greatest powerful models available, I asked for a brochure or a one-page flyer on the model he was describing. His response was that the model he suggested was not in the store yet and that he had no information to give me. I asked him for a model number so I could research it myself online. He started to write the model number on a piece of paper and abruptly stopped.
TRENDING: St. Patrick's role on the 'external hard drive'
"I thought he was thinking of the model number, but to my surprise he turned to me and asked, 'How do I write the letter K?'
"I thought he was joking, but he wasn't. I asked for his pen and I wrote the letter K. As I was writing, he explained that he rarely writes anything, and if anything needs to be written, he does his writing on the keyboard.
"This is what we have digressed to. – Tom"
It's easy to scoff at this educated intelligent young man who could no longer remember how to write a K. But is it unusual? Apparently not. Articles are being written (on computers, not on paper) on "character amnesia" due to a lack of practice in the ancient art of writing. The average person hasn't hand-written anything in six weeks, and one in three hasn't written anything "properly" in more than six months.
Avid Luddite though I am, I too am prone to technological ease. I used to have a distinct callous on my middle finger where a pen or pencil pressed. I don't have it anymore.
Some people have a love affair with technology. I have a love-hate relationship, often leaning more toward hate.
It seems to me technology is leaving the realm of efficient and entering into the territory of creepy. You can purchase refrigerators hooked up to the Internet. Almost all new vehicles come equipped with GPS, wi-fi connections, OnStar, dash cams and other technological trackers. Your daughter's Barbie doll has built-in microphones to record conversations so Barbie can "interact" with your child. (Some have dubbed this Rat Fink Barbie.)
Now it seems wrist tattoos interfere with the functionality of the new Apple watches. The reason? The watch cannot detect the wearer's heart rate through the tattoo and thus doesn't "know" you're wearing it, thereby preventing the watch from operating Apple Pay, receiving notifications, placing calls or using certain apps. Does this watch actually tell the time or is that too passé?
If that doesn't sufficiently creep you out, apparently there's a new mattress cover in development called "Luna" that will turn out the lights for you when you go to sleep and get coffee ready for you when you wake up. It does this by detecting when you fall asleep, when you're waking up, and can even tell the difference between real sleep and fake sleep (as in, demonstrators in a showroom). As if that's not bad enough, "Data is stored on the smart mattress cover itself, and then sent to Luna for storage and analysis."
Analysis of what? And why do these people want these data?
C'mon, folks, how much technology is too much? Is it really necessary to have a fridge outfitted with an Internet screen or a watch that won't operate unless it can detect your heartbeat? Where does it end?
In the 2008 Pixar film, "WALL-E," Earth is garbage-covered and abandoned, with its population evacuated onto starliners. According to the Wikipedia summary, "The descendants of the ship's original passengers have become morbidly obese after centuries of microgravity effects and relying on the ship's automated systems for their every need." These tubby blobs of people are whizzed around in mechanized chairs. If they happened to fall out, they're as helpless as a turtle on its back.
When you no longer need to write the letter K, when you can check your refrigerator for the latest news or weather report, or when you expect your bedding to make your coffee, we're on the path toward WALL-E's world.
We are becoming a high-tech cashless society where children are self-lobotomized by their hand-held devices and have lost the ability to develop intimate relationships with others by limiting all interactions to 140 characters.
"Did we lose a war?" asks Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian. "Yes, we did but we didn't notice: The very things that we built to serve us, our technological hand maidens, have made us servile. … Such social niceties [as opening a door for someone] are rendered obsolete in this hideous new world, where we scan goods in silence apart from disembodied robot voices devoid of human warmth and leave without communicating to those of our species."
It's not just the social niceties that are disappearing. The entire collected body of human wisdom on how to survive without technology is disappearing at an alarming rate. Humans are becoming the blobs in WALL-E's world, incapable of thinking or doing anything for themselves. The dependency on technology is frightening. Should we lose that technology (power grid down?), it's been estimated 90 percent of Americans would die.
When television was introduced back in the '50s, doomsayers predicted a similarly dire future. Scoffers dismissed their concerns, and America became self-lobotomized by the boob tube. It marked the transition between imagination and analysis. No longer did people think and analyze for themselves. Instead, they were told what to think and what conclusions to draw.
Television taught people to spit on soldiers returning from Vietnam. It taught people that men were stupid, women were oppressed, marriage was unnecessary, children were smarter than their parents, and God is dead.
Now television – that first rung on the ladder of technological takeover – is passé. Today, we have a myriad of technological marvels to think for us – mattress pads, Barbie dolls, wrist watches and every hand-held "smart" device imaginable.
Coupled with the Common Core farce our public schools are embracing, it seems our children's future is doomed. We are not progressing; we are regressing.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go milk the cow. No technology needed. I call that progress.
Media wishing to interview Patrice Lewis, please contact [email protected].
|