Technology: creating a lazier tomorrow

2.4.10 / Opinion / By Sean Montgomery

Hey, want to know a spoiler? I know you can’t wait to get back to managing your FarmVille crops, so I’ll save you the time you’d spend reading this article: it ends with cheating.

(ChrisL_AK / Flickr)

Specifically, I had an opportunity several years ago, in my 10th grade psychology class, to score some major extra credit points for being the first to complete a difficult puzzle.

Instead of thinking it through on my own, I relied on the Internet to serve me the solution on a silver platter.

Filled with the kind of blissful euphoria that comes with having stolen a cookie from the cookie jar undetected, I turned in my assignment, much to the seething dismay of my classmates.

There you go. I’ve summarized this long, annoying rant in four sentences so that you can skip it. In fact, you could skip this entire issue of The Call if you really wanted. Of course, we’d much prefer you didn’t, as we spend a lot of time ensuring each publication is the best it can be. Instead, I urge you to dig through it. Mystery is all around us, and life is so much more rewarding when you dig for the answers to your questions.

These days, the Internet and technology in general has granted us the ability to satisfy our greatest curiosities instantly. Want to know how to solve a Rubik’s Cube? Google has over 500,000 results to help you do it without peeling the stickers off. Why then should we bother with putting forth unnecessary effort when a few keystrokes can tell us everything we need to know on the spot?

Don’t get me wrong. This article isn’t meant to be some sort of anti-technology tirade. I myself am borderline obsessed when it comes to owning the latest techno gadgets. Technology can simplify so much for us. After all, there’s an app for just about everything on the iPhone. But by the same token, it has made us thankless and lazy.

Think back to the last time you actually bought a hard copy of a new music CD. It’s probably been awhile, hasn’t it? Finding new artists we like used to be a meaningful chore. We’d have to browse bargain bins until something caught our eye. With the advent of iTunes and Amazon, we can now download entire albums which we may never even listen to on a whim.

One of the most disconcerting things for me as an aspiring filmmaker is knowing that there will always be people out there just wanting to know how a movie ends. The Internet makes accessing these spoilers ridiculously easy. The real damage, however, isn’t that the secret is prematurely discovered. It’s that the experience – the thrill of watching the film and enduring the twists and turns – is destroyed. People have become so concerned with outcomes that the journey is no longer important.

The question to be asked then is this: do you possess the self-control to not choose the easy answer all the time? In 10th grade psychology class, I did not. My teacher Mr. Myers told the class he would give bonus points to the first student who could complete the Sudoku puzzle on the board. Now, I realize there are those of you out there who find Sudokus enjoyable. If you happen to be one of those mentally ill people, I hope you get better soon.

In any case, after about 15 minutes of pulling my hair out, I became hell-bent on getting those bonus points. I excused myself from class to go to the restroom, but instead, I went to the library to find an online Sudoku solution generator. It was admittedly disheartening to watch a computer assemble the correct sequence of numbers in a fraction of a second. Still, I returned to class with my holy grail, barely concealing the grin of a Cheshire cat.

I got my promised reward, but at what cost? I imagine people work on Sudokus because they relish the satisfaction of figuring it out. On that day, I’d traded that satisfaction for a cheat. It’s tempting to want to skip ahead to the endgame, what with technology clearing the path, but doing so lessens the experience and renders the accomplishment meaningless. An ending should never be the experience itself – it’s all in the doing.

Sean Montgomery is the graphics editor of The Call.

Tags: Editorial, Top Story |