Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Technology makes you stupid

I used to remember people's phone numbers. Now I just touch my iphone screen and voila, the someone I'm calling is answering. I barely remember my own phone number to tell it to other people. If my phone gets lost or broken I'm SOL. There's a cell company now that stores your data on their server or something so when your phone falls in the toilet they can upload all the stuff your brain used to house into your new phone. Why do they still make phone books? No one uses them.

I used to be able to read a map and find my own way around very nicely. Now I use a GPS and wait for the lady in the little box to tell me where to turn left. She's gotten me in trouble more than once. Nobody wants you to give them directions either. They just want the address and they'll look it up on Mapquest if they don't have a GPS. If you trust Mapquest to find my house you're likely to wind up in a trailer park. It's not a nice place. You don't want to go there. I could have told you that when I gave you directions.


Now instead of giving someone your phone number, they can scan the barcode on your shirt into their phone and it will direct them to your myspace or facebook or twitter page. He/she can find out if you're married or single, what your interests are, what you do for a living or where you go to school, before you are even introduced. We used to call that small talk.


I'd like to say that using a calculator has caused me to lose all of my math skills, but I never had any to begin with.

4 comments:

Extreme Educators said...

I read the whole barcode shirt thing, Holy Crap!!! That's ridiculous!!! And to think there is an entire group of people out there who don't even use email!

Cari said...

I know! The world is being divided between techni people and non-techi.

Mark said...

We used to write letters and call on a landline. Then we got cell phones. After that it was email. On to text messages and now it's twitter. I don't think I can put three complete sentences together. OOPS, Cari just texted for me to go pick her up. SHould I reply or TWITTER???

Stephen said...

Similarly, cell phones or PDAs could read the signals from wearable RFID tags, automatically query the personal databases of the wearer, and notify you of possible mates where there's a statistical match above a predefined threshold. Then as the night wears on, you've had too much to drink, and the talent pool starts shrinking, said threshold can be dialed back from optimistic to realistic to desperate. Yech.