Toxic Tech?
July 14, 2009 - by Molly Mann
Odds are, if you're reading this blog (or if you even know what a blog is) you're a tech junkie. Welcome to the club. We Facebook, we Tweet, we text, and we often find our portal to the world is a tiny LCD screen.
Understandably, many are up in arms about this tech revolution, wondering with trepidation what kind of future we can have that is so far removed from our grandparents' pen and paper existences. Researchers are even suggesting that our excessive - in their opinion - reliance on technology will rewire our brains and "impair cognition, spur depression and change neural circuitry in areas of the brain responsible for mood and thought" (Gary Small, director of UCLA's Memory & Aging Research Center, paraphrased by Allan Richter in his article, "Our Rewired Brains," which appeared in the April 2009 issue of Energy Times). They worry that our brains will lose the ability to perform tasks that we have trained computers to do for us, sort of like factory workers being laid off and replaced by machines.
Scientists are also concerned about technology's effect on our emotional health, concluding that computers promote isolation. Richter cites research from the Nielsen Mobile firm that on average, kids get their first cell phone before age 11, and that the typical American teenager sends or receives more than 1700 test messages monthly, while making only 230 calls in the same time period. He interpreted the data to mean that young people aren't connecting on any meaningful basis, only increasing their isolation by avoiding face-to-face contact through texts.
While I understand and appreciate Richter's perspective, as well as those of the experts he cites, I heartily disagree with him. Rather, I disagree with the underlying assumptionof his article, that we could change these things if we found they were really bad. Since some guy in a cave rubbed two sticks together to make fire, the parade of technology has marched steadily onward, and appears to have an infinite range. Human beings tend to take a very solipsistic view of the world, but the harsh reality is that creatures must adapt to their environment, not the other way around. Just like mammals adapted to living on dry land, we, too, will adapt to the changing demands of our world.
We have already, and will continue to use technology to develop social networking sites to build our interpersonal relationships, and software that requires creativity and critical thinking skills on the part of the user. We just don't know what we will accomplish years from now, or what the future will look like, just like our grandparents could never have anticipated the things we do today. And that is its beauty, not its downfall.
