Cell Phones
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams,
The Salmon of Doubt
And then there was Socrates, warning against writing things down because it will rot the kids memories. And a similar outrage at the printing press. And the newspaper. And radio. And television. And computers. And then finally the internet. To be followed by whatever comes next...
A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook.
Oh, I understand the value and am not against the technology at all- I just find it sad that so many people have become so reliant on it that they become totally lost without it. How many times, when confronted with simple math, have you seen people reach for their phone, open the calculator app, and sit there punching in numbers- "Lets see, dinner was $21.00, and we need to split it three ways, hmmm..."
Or the people who stand there watching cute pet videos while their own dog is sitting patiently at their feet, begging for a little attention.
Or the kids at work sitting around the breakroom table, texting each other two feet away.
Or "We're not having a Class reunion, we'll just form a Fakebook group".
Even Zuckerberg has gone on record as saying he deeply regrets having developed Facebook.
It's not the technology that's bad (I use it regularly- I'm here, right? and I don't carry around a slide rule anymore, either!), but it's some people's habitual mindless dependence on it that will rot us to our core.
