A Few of My Favorite Things

It occurred to me today that there is a whole generation of kids growing up on GPS that may very well never learn to read a map or know North from South.  How crazy is that?  It’s like in Back to the Future 3 when we see that technology has taken over so many menial tasks, it’s negatively affecting the human species.  Just think about our grandparents who didn’t grow up with calculators, TV, computers, the internet, GPS, cell phones, e-tickets, e-mail.  They actually had to write letters (a dying art), figure out directions for themselves and ahead of time, and figure out how to get un-lost if lost, without using a cell phone, or pay phone for that matter.  They didn’t have news 24/7, and weren’t able to “go online” to find out, well, pretty much anything they had questions about. 

I’m starting to really worry about the younger generations.  Will their lives be blessed because of progress or eventually hurt by it?  They won’t be required to learn how to read a map or do long-hand math or correspond by snail-mail.  Seriously, how do we learn survival skills when the answer to the problem is to make a call on the cell phone, or send a text message to Google through the phone for directions, or movie times, or word definitions.  Is it creating a new kind of resourcefulness or an unhealthy reliance on the wizard behind the curtain? 

Getting directions today means getting the address and either punching it into the GPS or into Yahoo/Google maps and printing out the directions to take with you.  If we get lost even in spite of those two methods, we can always use our cell phones to help us get unlost.  I know I’m too dependant on, or maybe it’s “addicted to,” my GPS, but I consider myself exceptional with directional sense and a map.  I learned that stuff pre-GPS, probably from my parents, because they love maps too.  (My sister, the only other person who reads this blog, is also very keen on maps.)  Even so, I get a little panicky when I don’t have the GPS.  In the old days (ok, my childhood), I don’t think we panicked when we got lost.  Or maybe I did, and my current dependancy on the GPS is based on my childhood fears of getting lost. 

At any rate, I think we’re at a pivotal point in our culture.  It could be the moment in time when we offload so many tasks to technology and machines that it begins to dumb down the human race.  I mean, really, if you don’t use it, you lose it, right?  If you don’t exercise, your muscles shrink.  If we don’t use our brains, they’ll get weaker, right?  What if machines really do start to take over??  Ahhhhhhh!  This could be an episode of the Twilight Zone.