Technology These Days

We don’t yet know what, if any, the implications will be for a generation coming of age in a digital era, and the question fills even the most tech-savvy among us with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. I grew up knowing what it was like not to be in front of a glowing screen and not being able to get online. Or in the process of getting online, there were all kinds of beeps and whirrs that resulted in not being able to use the land line. These days most people do not even have a home phone because cell phones and other internet phone services have replaced the need for a land line. It is true the pervasiveness of technology is shaping us, whether or not we like it — but perhaps it is also true that comparing the future with an outdated past is not going to beget any reliable answers anytime soon. Do you feel that technology has shaped your life in a negative or positive way? It is something that we cannot live without nor avoid in our lives. Socrates once railed on and on about how writing is going to ruin humanity because people will not need to remember things if they simply write them down. Clearly, there is more to the written word than he thought.