Technology is supposed to have made life easier. The advent of the light bulb made it easier for companies to stay open 24 hours, made it easier for people to go to work after dark, made it easier to make bigger profits. It also made it easier to read at night, to go from house to house visiting neighbors, to perform life-saving surgeries.Each technological advancement has brought with it unforeseen consequences, both good and bad.
Libraries
Our reliance on increasingly advanced information storage and retrieval systems has crippled the usefulness of our increasingly multimedia libraries. These last bastions of hard copy storage have switched from the card catalog to a computer data base system, which includes information from other libraries.
This should be a good thing – more access to more information for the masses. The problem arises when you don’t have time to wait for a book to come from somewhere else, or worse, you don’t have a library card.
Doing a search on the computer for “dinosaur skeleton weights” retrieved four listings for the Land Before Time IV movie before pulling up a book available in Detroit. A 20 minute search yielded nothing but frustration. Had a card catalog been available, 20 minutes would have been enough time to know if a book on the subject was available in the library collection.
Cell Phones
The popularity of cell phones has made the pay phone an endangered species. This wouldn’t be a problem if everyone had a cell phone and if the disappearance of the phone booth didn’t also mean the extinction of the phone book.
Not everyone can afford to partake in the cell phone revolution. Now they must find a phone to use when they need help and aren’t at home. Search far and search near, working phone booths continue to disappear.
If you are new to a neighborhood, forget about our favorite target of vandalism. No longer can you desecrate the address king by tearing out his pages one at a time. He has been made obsolete by the sheer pressures of capitalistic tendencies.
Instead of going to the nearest phone booth, which is now non-existent, and finding a somewhat intact phone book, you must either use your cell phone (if you have one) and pay for information (I’ve heard quotes up to $1.50 a call), or you have to go all the way home and call the place where you are going.
Imagine how inconvenient it would be to take a road trip eight hours away and find out that your cell plan doesn’t cover that area and that there are no phone books available to find your destination.
People are reduced to common beggars, looking for someone to loan them a phone. Or maybe they are lifted up to exalted pilgrim looking for the Holy Grail of Phones and its companion tome.
Too much technology is a curse not a blessing. Why use an electric can opener when it is just as easy to use a hand-powered one? (Not only is it better for the environment, it will save you some money on your electric bill.) Try to eliminate the unnecessary in your life and watch the quality of your life go up.
Libraries
Our reliance on increasingly advanced information storage and retrieval systems has crippled the usefulness of our increasingly multimedia libraries. These last bastions of hard copy storage have switched from the card catalog to a computer data base system, which includes information from other libraries.
This should be a good thing – more access to more information for the masses. The problem arises when you don’t have time to wait for a book to come from somewhere else, or worse, you don’t have a library card.
Doing a search on the computer for “dinosaur skeleton weights” retrieved four listings for the Land Before Time IV movie before pulling up a book available in Detroit. A 20 minute search yielded nothing but frustration. Had a card catalog been available, 20 minutes would have been enough time to know if a book on the subject was available in the library collection.
Cell Phones
The popularity of cell phones has made the pay phone an endangered species. This wouldn’t be a problem if everyone had a cell phone and if the disappearance of the phone booth didn’t also mean the extinction of the phone book.
Not everyone can afford to partake in the cell phone revolution. Now they must find a phone to use when they need help and aren’t at home. Search far and search near, working phone booths continue to disappear.
If you are new to a neighborhood, forget about our favorite target of vandalism. No longer can you desecrate the address king by tearing out his pages one at a time. He has been made obsolete by the sheer pressures of capitalistic tendencies.
Instead of going to the nearest phone booth, which is now non-existent, and finding a somewhat intact phone book, you must either use your cell phone (if you have one) and pay for information (I’ve heard quotes up to $1.50 a call), or you have to go all the way home and call the place where you are going.
Imagine how inconvenient it would be to take a road trip eight hours away and find out that your cell plan doesn’t cover that area and that there are no phone books available to find your destination.
People are reduced to common beggars, looking for someone to loan them a phone. Or maybe they are lifted up to exalted pilgrim looking for the Holy Grail of Phones and its companion tome.
Too much technology is a curse not a blessing. Why use an electric can opener when it is just as easy to use a hand-powered one? (Not only is it better for the environment, it will save you some money on your electric bill.) Try to eliminate the unnecessary in your life and watch the quality of your life go up.
As you get older, fear, too, falls and vanishes, and that is not necessarily an unqualified blessing.
- A. Alvarez |
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