Bjcorbin's Blog

We certainly live in a time of amazing technological advancements, and while many of those developments have represented a significant enhancement from the status quo, there have also been some troubling side effects. I’ve listed a few of those below:

• Diminishing problem solving/critical thinking skills – Our minds are like our physical bodies, they need to be exercised to remain strong and healthy. Increasingly, we have an “App.” for just about everything, and we have quickly grown accustomed to doing things with the push of a button. More and more, the technology is doing the thinking for us, and we are progressively losing our ability to do things manually. When the technology fails us, we are generally thrown into a state of turmoil, and are often unable to proceed.
• Diminishing perseverance and endurance – Since most of these advances tend to make things faster and easier, our expectations are evolving accordingly. As time goes on, our patience and tolerance for anything that doesn’t come fast and easy is waning. The emerging generations are growing up with the concept that everything in life ought to be like that, and a growing reluctance to endure anything that is not.
• Trading the real world for virtual reality – The cyber-world has grown to become its own alternate reality, and for many, it has begun to eclipse the real world. Progressively, westerners are spending a lot more time interacting with digital screens than with each other. Most have a lot more “friends” on their social networking site than actual people they associate with regularly, and many seem to be losing their ability to express themselves in complete sentences or beyond 140 characters.
• A growing “faith” in technology – Young people seem to take great pride in the technological advances of recent years. They tend to view them as a defining characteristic of their generation. And because of this, they don’t necessarily feel bound to the lessons of history. In the minds of many, the failures of previous generations are rooted in their lack of good technology. For them, there is no problem that humanity has that technology won’t soon resolve.