Are we too dependent on technology?

[aokoye]

I also find the whole thing ironic given that this is being asked and the original blog post was written via social networking (yes I would consider a forum a social network)/new media.

I always find such arguments thin. Would this not mean that an alcoholic should not give advice regarding alcohol consumption, a fat overweight person should not give advice on nutrition, or a drug addict on drug addiction etc etc. Sometimes those people who have dealth with the extremes or lived through the troubles in one particular area of life and are possibly still going through them are the best to provide advice. If we should not discuss technology being potentially negative for us, none of us would be able to comment.

The problem with your argument is that an alcoholic, drug addict, etc isn't getting any health benefit from their addiction (outside of some seriously maladaptive coping mechanisms which aren't comparable to this). Never mind that I don't actually think we are too dependent on technology. I don't think it makes us uncreative, I think the "our memory is lacking because of it" is a poor argument, and so on.

[Systematiker]

For what it's worth, the argument "our memory is not as good due to developments in technology" really is "we use specific skills, ones that were previously considered benchmarks, less and are thus less skilled in those areas". It's not quite the same thing.

And the thing about the medium of complaining about the medium : didn't we have an article quoting Plato, who records in writing a dialogue of Socrates (if it is Socrates) complaining about the negative effect of recording things in writing?

I'll admit to having a concern about my attention span since the advent of smartphones - but how much of that is environmental, I couldn't tell you.

[Cainntear]

Look at money. We once had bartering. Then we 'progressed' to money backed by gold. Then money backed by nothing, credit cards, eftpos cards, and potentially a cashless society. Worse still a society in which chips are used in random objects such as a ring on one's finger for payment. It's all to get us comfortable with the idea of a chip in our body.

Those clever Mesopotamians, planning five thousand years in advance. I'm really impressed at how well they understood the potential of semiconductor technology for miniaturisation.

[Systematiker]

Look at money. We once had bartering. Then we 'progressed' to money backed by gold. Then money backed by nothing, credit cards, eftpos cards, and potentially a cashless society. Worse still a society in which chips are used in random objects such as a ring on one's finger for payment. It's all to get us comfortable with the idea of a chip in our body.

Those clever Mesopotamians, planning five thousand years in advance. I'm really impressed at how well they understood the potential of semiconductor technology for miniaturisation.

To be fair, you could say it's a progression of abstraction from a concrete to a reoresentation of assigned value, assigning value to the self and its activities, and then moving to the direct exchange of the abstract idea from its location (embedded) in the self for a concrete object.

That is to say, once we move to a representation of value that has no physical counterpart, and embed that somatically, there's less dissonance for the idea of selling parts of what it's embedded in, or even other bodies (selves). It's not unheard of in moral philosophy dealing with embodied affects as prior to logos-rationality.

So I'm giving PM the benefit of the doubt that that's what he means...

[PeterMollenburg]

Look at money. We once had bartering. Then we 'progressed' to money backed by gold. Then money backed by nothing, credit cards, eftpos cards, and potentially a cashless society. Worse still a society in which chips are used in random objects such as a ring on one's finger for payment. It's all to get us comfortable with the idea of a chip in our body.

Those clever Mesopotamians, planning five thousand years in advance. I'm really impressed at how well they understood the potential of semiconductor technology for miniaturisation.

And yet I'd say it's been going on for many more thousands of years than you suggest. The truth is stranger than fiction and thus most people never dig for it. I'm already reducing what I had to say, feel free to PM me, as this topic is expanding beyond where administrators would like it to go. I'm going to distract myself with language learning