Posts Tagged ‘rage’

I love technology. If it wasn’t for technology, like so many other businesses,  we wouldn’t be in business.  Like all good things, there always seems to be bad about it as well.

Imagine my surprise when I realized a girl who just graduated from high school and was now taking colleges classes did not know the simple arithmetic problem 4 X 7. I thought to myself how could this girl graduate from high school not knowing her basic multiplication tables. Some of it of course lies within the school that she attended but then I realized that is not the full reason. It also lies within technology that we use, calculators. I don’t know about other areas in the country but in ours, once kids get to high school they are allowed to use calculators for all of their math. That totally amazes me. Of course, the lower grades they have to do all the arithmetic in their heads but as soon as they start using a calculator, everything they learned seems to go out the window.

I see this in grammar and spelling as well. All too often, people will type up an article, a website page, a letter etc and put it out there for the world to see without proofreading it. They rely on their word processing program to handle all the grammar and spelling mistakes. For spelling, the word processing program seems to do quite well but for grammar, not so much. Artificial intelligence can only be used to a certain extent. The files still need proofread. Now with the usage of twitter where you can only have 140 characters or less to get your point across people are resorting to text messaging short hand and acronyms. Don’t get me wrong I am on twitter and I love it but is it making us dumber?

Impatience seems to be a growing trend as well. Before, we used to only worry about road rage now we have to worry about phone rage, internet rage, and computer rage.

I remember when I got my first computer back in 1997 and I first connected to dial-up internet. I was amazed at all the information available on the internet. I spent hours and hours just looking up anything I could think of just because of the vast information that was available to me. I didn’t think about it being slow. Nowadays, if you don’t have high speed internet, people avoid you like the plague. They are totally shocked when they are told that somebody doesn’t have high speed internet. If for some reason, the internet is down for any length of time, people start to panic and get upset. Before, DSL and cable internet were the fastest internet available and now they are coming out with even faster internet speeds which are leaving DSL and cable in the dust. How long could you survive without internet access and could you survive on dial-up?

Cell phones are the source of phone rage. Most people have cell phones. If we try to contact somebody via a landline, and we can’t get them on the line the next step we take is to contact them via cell phone and if they can’t be contacted through that medium, we may start to panic or keep trying their landline and cell phone numbers and getting irritated because they can’t be reached. Cell phones are great especially in case of emergency. In fact, we have heard several times how cell phones have actually saved lives but is the need to be in constant contact with everything and everybody pushing our society towards more impatience?

As I said, I am not anti-technology but seeing how the next generation is in regards to relying so heavily on technology that they can’t even do simple arithmetic makes me wonder, is technology making us stupid and impatient?

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