Man, the dominant species of this planet has always survived because of his wits. Fire made caves warmer and food more nutritious, the wheel made moving mountains feel like a walk in the park, and the microchip made the world into one global village. However, these changes were not always met with blaring trumpets, velvet ropes, and red carpets. Technology has always had its fair share of rotten Easter eggs thrown its way.
Over the years, eyebrows continued to rise as people met everyday change with caution and skepticism. Villagers burned witches for practicing dark magic – a term more known today as chemistry. The oldies were scandalized as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison strummed their guitars. And Satan has manifested his Earthly presence in the form of the boob tube. With all the said examples, it would have been inevitable for the researchers to turn scornful eyes on other technologies as well.
Nowadays, the television isn’t the only one to be subpoenaed whenever a death occurs in a nearby neighborhood. There are the cell phones that fry our brains and shrink our balls whenever we make a phone call to mom. There are the calculators, whose improvement is inversely proportional to the arithmetic skills of college students. There are these computer games that give us the freedom to kill old ladies for driving too slow. The list goes on: from exploding compact disks to cancerous sweetening agents – both inescapable necessities for some people today.
The question has just been waiting to be asked: have we been enslaved by our own technology? Victims of our own success? For as technology continues to improve – so does its complexity. It would take seven steps to program a microwave to defrost a pound of fish, four steps to set your cell phone to silent mode, and five steps to save this article and shut down the computer. For people who don’t bother to read the manual, the world has become one big puzzle. Reason enough for multimillion dollar technical support industries to be established. But who cares, more jobs for us Mapuans, right?
On a different light, there are some people who view technology as a god-sent gift. Video games are said to heighten the senses and bestow us a handful of skills. Television and radio give a whole new different meaning to renaissance. Cell phones make dad’s Saudi job seem like a walk across the street. Ultimately, it would be how we use the technologies that would judge their worth.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I feel like watching some people shoot each other, I cook some popcorn in the microwave and use my cell phone to text some friends to come over. After the movie, we boot up the PC and try to hack each other’s heads off. When study time comes, we pull out our calculators and integrate the hyperbolic cosine of ten times pi faster than Aristotle ever could. As for the people who continue to despise calculators but continue to use them, you better get a slide rule.
A shoutout to all my friends and family. Wazup!? To my editors, thank you for your patience. And to everyone else, I hope you like my spanking hot and brand new column, refresh. Just a little something something from the proverbial waters of my incredibly saturated mind. For comments, suggestions, violent reactions and friendster accounts: my email add is ismalakas@yahoo.com, or you could send more formal requests to tnb@mapua.edu.ph.
