Coming Full Circle with Technology

My Momma used to say that as time passes on, the world would get weaker and wiser. Sounds like an oxymoron, but I can definitely see that concept unfolding in today’s technology-driven society.

Here are some examples to illustrate my point:

My hometown of New Orleans has a long-standing tradition among its natives to cook and eat red beans on Mondays. Reason being that in the old days of ladies going about the time consuming task of hand washing clothes and hanging them outside on clothes lines to dry, a pot of red beans which did not require the careful eye of a cook, was the ideal dish to serve for a deliciously healthy dinner.

Today, washer and dryer machines has made washing clothes by hand a thing of the past. And the process of cooking red beans – or anything else for that matter has become all the more convenient, thanks to the technology of microwaves, slow-cookers, food processors and the like. Such time saving innovations have made domestic tasks easier. It seems then that people would take full advantage of these amenities and prepare healthy meals at home. So why is America’s obesity rate so high? The growing obesity rate signifies weakness, the development and use of technology to make cooking quicker and easier - wisdom.

In class we discussed Robert Putman’s book entitled “Bowling Alone,” which talks about America’s decline in civic activities as television watching became a major pass-time. Although often referred to as an “idiot box,” television is our primary news source. However, as suggested in “Bowling Alone,” television has weakening our involvement in social, political and community activities.

Bottom line, technology has penetrated every area of our lives, and has even provided us with the option to live alternative lives in the virtual world with applications such as Second Life. There are concerns that members of generation Y may lack traditional social skills being that they came of age in a time of instant messaging, text messages, and online social networks.

Technology is a wonderful thing that makes life easier by saving us time and helping us to stay organized, ideally freeing up more hours in the day that we could spend with family and friends, working toward goals, etc. But it seems like the more time that technology helps us to free up, the more time we spend with technology – websurfing, watching videos on YouTube, downloading media files, blogging and so on.

The book that I chose to review for this class “Click on Democracy” discusses the role the internet played in the 2000 presidential election. Reading the book made me think about how the internet is helping us to come full circle by reconnecting like-minded people who care about improving our society and are using online resources and building organizations such as moveon.org.

Technology is a wonderful thing, and I appreciate the benefits of living in this digital age. I would just like to see our society more frequently using the advantages of technology to make us both stronger and wiser.