Looking back at my life in its totality in retrospect up to this very moment, with no clear idea of what tomorrow will look like, I can ascertain one thing – technology has been a blessing and a curse. With no area of my life left unaffected, life itself is anything but simple. I have come to realize that I can either embrace the swift movements of the technological backbone of this country, or be left out to dry. In 2010, I find myself riding the tail of a technologically savvy comet moving at an exponentially increasing speed. This comet is so empowering that I doubt I would ever want to be too close to its nose. However, I am curious to know how hot the fire is - curious about the complex, enlightened brains of the well-versed computer technicians and seasoned software programmers. Have they really gained something that I should envy?
To some extent, I have only “gone with the flow” of the technology wave. I was a child who was taught to read and write on the computer, spent my free time playing the latest video games, and began texting on my cell phone at age eleven. It isn’t until at this age, in the closing years of my adolescence that I step back and retrospectively look at how technology has molded my life. The mighty cell phone has served me as a guiding light and my right hand man. In an awkward social situation, to whom do I turn? When my expected ride to school on test day is a no-show, what is my reflex? When my Jeep sinks in the opaque depths of a Costa Rican river, where might I reach to find the nearest flashlight? The answer is the most convenient place I could ever find an answer – inside my pocket. This is the kind of answer technology provides: a perpetually accessible answer on the receiving end of a short lived dial tone.
Yet the truth is, the dial tones of our most familiarly acquainted technologies are not short lived – in fact, they never subside. Our eardrums have grown numb to their mellow frequencies. These frequencies can be as high-pitched as a laptop or a muted television, or as dull as a humming air conditioner or refrigerator. My fear is that our brains are becoming too lax, traveling on autopilot due to what has become an involuntary process of seeking and gathering information. With computers and cell phones like combat tools resting in their holsters on our belts, a bottomless cauldron of information and communication is forever within reach of our hands, where it takes no more than a twitch of the wrist and bend of a finger to pull the trigger.
As our ears have adjusted to the constant hum of the dial tones, our bodies have adjusted to the added weight of our tool belts. These belts have possibly become bodily extensions, inexplicable to their owners – twenty-first century students that live in a culture defined by technology. As the bodies of these students become instrumental machines, their actions become mechanized. This is a generation of students who have grown up as players in a digital interface world, where all of their adaptation and growth are only credible because of existing technology. Their skills begin and end with the precursor of the computer. Stuart Selber succinctly writes, “although students will develop some extremely useful skills under an instrumental approach, they will have a much more difficult time thinking critically, contextually, and historically about the ways computer technologies are developed and used within our culture and how such use, in turn, intersects with writing and communication practices in the classroom.” The accomplished student who is a technical genius in the computer lab could lack essential communicative skills. The value of technological advancement does not reach into our lives any further than technology does.
Works Cited
Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies For A Digital Age. Southern
