Techschmology

Before I make the following statement I feel it’s necessary to state that I understand the hypocrisy. That being said, I hate technology.

 It all started with calculators. Calculators (not graphing calculators, mind you, we’ll get to those later) are horribly inefficient. In elementary school I was repulsed by the idea of using a calculator for any of the four basic mathematical functions. If I couldn’t find the answer mentally faster than I could punch the problem into my calculator then that was a sign that I should have stayed in bed that morning. Math is sort of like a second language in its own right. If you don’t practice regularly it gets harder. Using a calculator is like the opposite of practice. I think more people would be good at math if they weren’t so comfortable just saying that they were bad at it.

Of course, there comes a point when it’s no longer faster to do things with pen and paper. This is when one will rely on either a computer or their trusty graphing calculator. A graphing calculator has the ability to, you know, graph, which is a pretty handy tool. However, the differences between a basic calculator and a graphing calculator allow the user to have games on their computation device. Which brings me to my next qualm- technology is distracting. Can you think of any classes in High School that were more interesting than playing Galaxian? Maybe. Are any of them math classes? Probably not.

Graphing calculators don’t even compare to smart phones in this regard. I remember when the first generation of iPhone was released. A friend of mine was strangely eager to drop $500 on the new model as soon as it was released. After he picked it up I never saw his eyes again. There are some useful things that smart phones do. I mean, I don’t know what any of these things are, but I have to believe that they exist. Mostly they just make people forget about their surroundings. It’s ironic how much damage that a device designed for communication has done to face to face interaction: a topic much broader than I will bother to delve into for the purposes of this post.

And what the hell is the deal with Angry Birds? Why on Earth should I, a person who neither owns a smart phone nor has any desire to acquire one, have ever heard of that game? I hear somebody mention Angry Birds at least once a week and I can’t for the life of me make any sense of it. Perhaps there’s more value to simplistic handheld gaming than I understand, but that’s an error of judgment that I have no reservations about making.

Recently I started driving with a GPS. I quickly learned that it did not “know” the roads in my hometown as well as I did. I was heading to Minneapolis this weekend which required me to get onto a highway that is roughly a mile from my house. Instead the GPS thought it would be cool to drive two miles and meet the highway further along. I suppose that driving in town longer meant better gas mileage, but the route the GPS sent me on involved taking a left turn over a median that was constructed about a year ago. When I went right to turn around at a roundabout just down the way (which really has no business being there, but that’s another story) the GPS began to recalibrate my position to try to determine a new route. Hooray for satellite positioning. It’s nice to have for getting to places that I’ve never been, but I’ve started to unplug the machine as soon as I even vaguely recognize my surroundings.

So, this might have been more of an incoherent rant than anything else, and I didn’t even touch on the scary side of technology (gogo Skynet), but I think I got my position across. If you can do it yourself, you should.