There’s been a theme to my reading this week: technology is neither all good nor all bad.\u00a0 In the midst of all the amazing discoveries with their potential to increase human knowledge, understanding and community, there are negative consequences that we must take into consideration.<\/p>\n
It began with an article in Forbes about Technologies That Hurt Us<\/a>.\u00a0 The article draws on the work of David Friedman whose book Future Imperfect: Technology And Freedom In An Uncertain World<\/em><\/span> discusses the potential dangers of a variety of technologies including biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.\u00a0 The ultimate danger, according to Friedman, is human extinction.\u00a0 Quite an unintended consequence, isn’t it?\u00a0 The article also focused on more mundane negative physical consequences of technology such as the kid who spends the summer playing video games and then heads to the first day of football practice only to get hurt.\u00a0 Or, the Wii tennis players who don’t get the breaks found in the “real” game so end up getting a much more difficult workout.\u00a0 The recommendation from orthopedic surgeons is simple: warm up before you fire up the Wii and, if more sedentary video games are your style, be sure to move around now and then.\u00a0 As for Friedman and his dire warnings, he says that the answer is not to stop technology:<\/p>\n The benefits of owning a smarter computer than the next guy, for example, are just too great. “This train doesn’t have brakes, and from my perspective at least, the main thing to do is not to say, ‘Should we encourage it, or should we stop it?’ ” Friedman says. Instead Friedman suggests two questions: “Where can we guess this technology will lead, and if we get there, what should we do?”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I was reminded of this article when I read Wes Fryer’s post<\/a> about the end of his game of Travian.\u00a0 He described an alliance member who spent so much time playing the game that it took a negative toll on his health.\u00a0 In the end, he didn’t win but he did get a mention in the letter.\u00a0 I guess only he can decide if it was worth it.<\/p>\n Then, there’s the whole question of whether the Internet is making us dumb.\u00a0 Nicholas Carr’s lengthy article<\/a> in The Atlantic <\/em>described his concerns about how the Internet was changing his reading habits.\u00a0 It’s something that Will Richardson<\/a> has also discussed in response to Carr’s article.\u00a0 Carr recognizes the grey areas in his argument as he describes the skeptics who accompanied every major technological development: Socrates worried about the effect of writing on memory and humanists worried that the printing press would lead to laziness and revolution.\u00a0 Yet, these technologies have had amazingly positive influences on human knowledge and learning.\u00a0 In the end, though, Carr comes down on the side of deep reading.\u00a0 He writes, “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”\u00a0 Yet, in a recent New York Times<\/em> article, Damon Darlin<\/a> defends the use of Google as a technology that actually frees our mind.\u00a0 He writes, “Over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.” He comes down on the side of the optimists who believe in human improvement.<\/p>\n I am reminded once again that we are living in a grey area, trying to find a balance between the positive and negative effects of the technology that surrounds us.\u00a0 And, as educators, we need to have these conversations with out students.<\/p>\n Since this post is probably already too long for most of you, I’ll write about my own reading experiences later but here’s a teaser: my own reading still involves books, although they are mostly fiction, and I find that I can still do lengthy reading as long as I can have a pencil, either analog or digital, in my hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s been a theme to my reading this week: technology is neither all good nor all bad.\u00a0 In the midst of all the amazing discoveries with their potential to increase human knowledge, understanding and community, there are negative consequences that we must take into consideration. It began with an article in Forbes about Technologies That … Continue reading Living in the Grey Area<\/span>