Is It Really Progress
- Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 16:44
- Technology
- 1 comment
How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?
-Paul Sweeney
I came across this quote today and it made me stop and think of how impatient we have become.
When computers first came out, people expected that it would take some time for them to process whatever actions we had given them to do. Huge rooms were devoted to the computers. The instruction cards were input and the operators went off to do other things while the computer churned away on its task, eventually spitting out the information at the other end.
Now there is more memory in a calculator than was in those behemoths and computers process that same information in a few seconds or even milliseconds and we have come to expect it.
Everything is being designed for high speed – flash movies, videos, audio messages. But what about those of us who are still stuck in the world of dial-up? We become impatient with the slow loading of the web-page we wanted to view, frustrated by the fact that we have to wait 10 minutes for a video that we were told we should see, annoyed by the stu -te – ring voices we hear as we download another page.
Our children take text messaging for granted and feel that they should be able to do it any time they want, including in classrooms. Whatever happened to writing a note and passing it to the person you wanted to get it, taking a chance on a teacher intercepting it on the way!
What happened to calling our friends on the phone to talk, or going to actually visit them??? Oh my gosh….how did we do it before MSN and webchat or text messages?
What happened to just taking some time to spend together instead of trying to fit in a quick note on our cell phones as we do something else.
Technology has improved our lives in many ways, but it has also been damaging to our way of life.
People who have gone from dial-up to high speed forget how grateful they were to even have dial-up when they started working on their computers. Now, should their high speed be down for a day or two, they complain bitterly about having to wait. And those who never had anything but high speed think that those of us who have it are like the dinosaurs – extinct.
Our world is moving quickly forward with technology, new things are being made every day, but we have moved from community to isolation. We are inventing things that allow us to reach out electronically to those around us, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but when it interferes with or replaces actual face-to-face communication, how can we call it progress?
About the Author
Fran Watson has written 2 stories on this site.
One Comment on “Is It Really Progress”
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I think I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz it’s really helpful.