Technology

After reading Philip Dick’s idea about technology, I thought of how dependent we have become on it. Most of our generation would have no idea how to write a research paper withought the help of Google, while our parents had to physically go to the library and spend a large portion of time actually searching for the materials they needed before beginning to write. They were also limited in the information in that particular library. We now have such a huge amout of information at our fingertips, accessable by as little effort as the click of a few buttons. This is good for some reasons, but harmful for others. For example, a benefit of technology is what we were talking about today in class: because books can now be and have been stored on thousands of devices, such as computers, phones, and iPods, it is virtually impossible to burn books. However, I think the cons outweigh the pros. One con is that a lot of people trust everything they find on the Internet even though nobody checks most sites for validity. The scariest thing about technology for me is the lack of effort required to do things. It seems like our society is getting more and more lazy with each Apple device that comes out. The movie Wall-e displays this idea in a shocking way. Even though it’s a kids’ movie, it has an eerily close estimate of the future in my eyes. In Wall-e, the people are so dependent upon technology that they are too lazy to walk, or even take the energy to chew their food. We need to make sure we are in charge of our technology, not that technology is in charge of us.