Technophobia

For almost thirty-five years we've all been living in the era of technology. We're surrounded by it. Internet, e-mail, cell phones, I-Pods, computerized engines in our cars, the microwaves flowing through the atmosphere prompt AT&T to remind us daily, on our HD TV's, that we live in a world of possibilities. Yes, we do!

Just to list a few: we can track our kids,parents, stocks, neighbors, dogs, cats, weather, sports scores, sale items,movie critiques, and a variety of other things just by touching the screen of our i-phones. One of the ads for one of the newest phones shows a mother,that is out shopping, touching a screen on her hand held phone and seeing her young son at the dining room table doing his homework, she asks,"Why are you working in the dark?" With a touch of another image on her phone she turns on the chandelier over the table! How tender!

Another commercial shows a little girl tracking her dog, that seems to be running off on his own pursuits. I'm sure he has a chip inserted into his body.

Texting has become the number one method of communication. A mother was complaining one day about her young daughter that was riding in the back seat of the mother's car with one of her friends. The mother became aware that no conversation was going on, all was quiet in the back seat. She looked into the rear view mirror to see what was going on back there and found that the girls were texting each other. R U in trbl with U'r rents? Spelling has fallen by the wayside.

I always found it to be self satisfying to go into a library or in some cases, go to my own book shelves to seek information.I wanted to become a Renaissance woman. I wanted to be well versed in many fields of knowledge. Searching for knowledge, sometimes just randomly, was an exercise that I throughly enjoyed. I could go back to look at my reference books if the need arose. I looked upon that activity as a pleasure. There is something lacking in simply going to Wikipedia or any other reference engine on the internet to 'read up on it'. Boring and not at all challenging.

I have many reference books, one of them is entitled ,"The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" sub titled, "What Every American Needs to Know." Perhaps if some of the polititians and some of the voters were to read a few books like that they would not be so prone to make fools of themselves in their every day conversations.(I used to reward my students by reading a passage from one of my books to them. When they worked well they would ask for the reward. They ended up learning many, many facts by the end of the year. Believe it or not they enjoyed it and loved to discuss some of the facts.

I'm wondering how far away we are from having computer chips embedded under our skin, perhaps on the head, then we would not have to carry those infernal i-phones, i-pods, GPA's and other devises with us. It could be called a 'head pod' and it would carry all the information, music, knowledge, etc. We could have a key pad on our fingernails or maybe our teeth,(that would be neat ,we could use our tongue to activate it). Everybody could know where you are at all times, maybe you could establish a connection to the people you wanted to converse with and could have 'hands free' communication. Head to head, so to speak.You could download books onto your chip and just close your eyes and 'read' at all times. The people without head chips could be called block heads. Time marches on!! Ciao

This is not what I set out to write at all!