As I read my way through Clive
Thompson’s book Smarter Than You Think it
was clear from the start that technology had improved our lives exponentially. Technology
was intensely diverse, ranging from a low resolution video game all the way up
to machines that were capable of playing chess. These innovations were without
a doubt able to alter our lives for the better. Thus after reading this book I began
looking at today’s society through new eyes. However, what I ended up seeing wasn’t
the most uplifting psychologically.
I believe that although these new
forms of technology are powerful and quite useful, it has altered our mindset
in a somewhat negative way. Throughout his book Thompson discusses the numerous
benefits of living in a technologically advanced society but there was one
chapter in which he discussed a downside which really stuck in my mind. In Chapter
5: The Art of Finding he tells the reader about information and how it’s
stored, found, and shared. Through the vast amounts of technology society possesses,
the act of knowing countless information is less relevant. We are able to pull
up information whenever we require it. This could be seen as a convenience but I
believe it leaves society in a vulnerable place. If we were for some reason
unable to simply look up information, the overall amount that we would actually
know would be greatly reduced. I think Thompson puts it very well by saying, “When
my smartphone becomes stupid, I too become stupid”. Of course I’m not ruling
out the amount of information that is contained in books but I do think it’s
comparable to how much information is contained by our technology and. Also it doesn’t
seem too farfetched to imagine that someone with a question or concern would
simply type it in a search engine. Do you believe that we are too overly
dependent on our technology for information?
Yes, I do believe that we are too overly dependent on our technology for information. If we need to find information, the first thing we think of doing is going onto the internet. Because it's so fast and easy to access, we don't think of using our other resources other than our technology. This problem will get worse as the time passes by. What if one day all of our search engines or WiFi connections don't work? No one will think of having other back up resources.
ReplyDeleteBao,
ReplyDeleteI must say that I do understand your concept of how we are becoming dependent on our technology to find out information. But, the way I see it is that every time we look up the answer to one of our questions we take that information and add it to our overall stored knowledge. This occurs wether we research it in a book or ask Siri. The only thing that our technology is doing is making information finding quicker. Take this scenario. Say if you wanted to know what a Jamaican Dogwood tree looks like. You could travel all the way to Jamaica, find the native tree, and observe it but I'm sure many people would find that extremely unreasonable. This definitely is a waste of time when you could just simply type "Jamaican Dogwood tree" into Google and hundreds of photos would pop up as well as tons of written information in a matter of seconds. With both of these processes you still ultimately found an answer to your question.
So basically, what I'm trying to get to is that I believe that this human/technology dependency isn't totally bad for us. I'm not trying to say the experience of asking Google and going to Jamaica is the same but you still end up with the information you wanted.
I believe we do depend on technology but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Say you look up how to spell a word in a dictionary, its likely that you may not how to spell it in the future, but that's basically what is occurring when you Google something as it is a quick fix to your current gap of information. With society at the point where it is right now, it is easy and convenient for us to look up information whenever we feel the need to. We are merely using technology to fulfill a lack of knowledge that previously would have gone unanswered. In a sense we are not as drastically dependent on it as many people make it seem, we just use technology to satisfy our ever-present hunger for answers.
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