This is what people wanted.
Technology was supposed to revolutionise our lives and make things ten times easier.
It did revolutionise our lives, and it does make things ten times easier.
But there is also a flip-side which people ignored at the time, that it would encroach so much on our lives that for many people it becomes a crutch rather than a tool. People who grow up now will never have had a time without certain kinds of technology, so they will be incapable of doing certain things themselves unless they consciously learn it later in life. Like how lots of people these days don’t know how to cook because pre-prepared food is so cheap at a supermarket, and because going out to eat is relatively inexpensive.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing though, it’s more just a cultural shift.
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Is a crutch not a tool as well?
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Yeah but a crutch implies a kind of helpless dependency.
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can you explain your last paragraph in more detail?
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About it being a cultural shift? Well we’re moving from a culture that creates technology as a tool to do certain things in life, to a culture that lives their life through technology. For example, a mobile phone was designed to allow you to phone someone when you’re not near a landline. That’s fine. But now you can do pretty much everything on your phone if you want to: bank, shop, order a taxi, look up directions, take and edit photographs, send e-mails, listen to music, talk with your friends, find new friends, find romantic interests, watch films and TV shows, order food, read the news, etc. We’re spending more and more of our life interacting with technology rather than the ‘real’ world and that’s going to change us and cause conflict.
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true. good point but i was thinking about. [quote]But there is also a flip-side which people ignored at the time, that it would encroach so much on our lives that for many people it becomes a crutch rather than a tool. People who grow up now will never have had a time without certain kinds of technology, so they will be incapable of doing certain things themselves unless they consciously learn it later in life. Like how lots of people these days don’t know how to cook because pre-prepared food is so cheap at a supermarket, and because going out to eat is relatively inexpensive.[/quote]
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Edited by Kamots: 11/8/2017 5:45:29 PMI’ve always said that we’re in the middle of a transitional period. This sort of conflict between people tied to the previous era and those looking to the next is the result of transitional tension. We can see similar, smaller-scale transitions with technologies like radio and TV which had the same sorts of conflicts. Hopefully we can get through it fine.
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I find it hard to believe that this is just a stage. Surely this kind of tension has always happened between generations. It just so happens that things are changing more rapidly now than in days past - just look at how much has changed in the just last 20 years in terms of mobile phones and home computing.
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My point is that the last 30 years or so have been part of a transition towards a technology-based society. The increase in technology development speeds are more of a necessary characteristic of the transition. We’ve indeed seen this sort of conflict between social generations (democracy wasn’t exactly widely accepted after conception), but we can see it more clearly in the intermediary transitions that make up the social effects of the rapid technological advancements.
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Gotcha