An English paper I wrote last term ...

TECHNOLOGY

William Wordsworth once wrote:

'The world is too much with us
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers
We have given our hearts away
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.'

In 1807, when this text was published, Wordsworth was no, of course, dealing with the excess of cell phones in classrooms, or even the violence levels in video games. He was instead dealing with the evolution of the church, and people's views of both the natural and spiritual worlds. Wordsworth was trying to point out that development for development's sake negatively effects the way we interact with our surroundings, and alters our perceptions on things like religion, intellectualism, emotion, and beauty.

When writing this paper, I decided to do the whole 'responsibility' thing, and try to see things from the other side of the argument - the 'anti-technologists', if you will. So I did the whole freaking paper manually. No computer for me. And the results? Well I have rough drafts. I have references. I have sources and edits and notes and quotations. And once I sifted through all that, I got more rough drafts (the environmentalist in me is going insane thinking about all the trees I've killed in doing just this one paper). It has been the complete antithesis of fun; my hand was cramping like there was no tomorrow, and my brain felt like there wasn't going to be. But instead of discovering something along the lines of 'we depend on technology too much', suffering through this torture of a paper actually solidified my belief that technology makes it easier for kids to be smarterm not dumber. See, technology has the ability to function as a creative outlet, and in building creativity, kids today have the opportunity to develop the very part of the brain which researchers say technology destroys. Irony much?

Shel Silverstein, a well-know children's humourist and writer, created a poem called The Castle for one of his books. It goes like this:

'It's the fabulous castle of Now
You can walk in and wander about
But it's so very thin
Once you ARE, then you've BEEN -
And soon as your in, you're out.'

Although many readers view this poem and it's accompanying artwork as mere comedic nonsense, I'd like to think that perhaps there's a deeper, more profound meaning. Perhaps Silverstein was talking about our world today - a world of computers and cell phones and iPods and PDAs; a world of instants and digitals and colours and sounds. Perhaps Silverstein is appealing to our smarter, better halves - and expressing his frustrations about the quality of the social structures we call our society. I'd like to think he's calling us on our obsessive compulsions with instant gratification.

Then again, maybe he's just a crazy poet.

My grandfather is one of the smartest people I know. He's taken basically everything in the world apart, and put it all back together again. He knows how things work, and he's even patented a few inventions in his life. But I spent 15 minutes explaining my iPod to him, and he still only barely understands it. He's implicated a new rule for family gatherings: if you want to use your cell phone, you've got to take it outside. 'I don't want to see them', he says. 'I'm tired of you being antisocial in my house.' But the way I see it, aren't we being more social - ANTI-antisocial, if you will - by carrying on face-to-face AND texting conversations?

When it comes to technology, there are apparently only two sides - those who support technology, and those who oppose it. But I'd like to think that there is more of a grey area: perhaps those who support technology, but in moderation. I'd place myself in that category, because, personally, I love the freedom technology gives me.

Technology allows me to communicate with loved ones all over the world. Technology allows me to record my thoughts as fast as I think them, and rewrite them later on with only a few keystrokes. Technology allows me and my parents the comfort of knowing there's always a line of communication available between us.

So what does say, a newspaper allow? Dust. To collect on your recycling pile.

Readers, our parents' generation survived without iPods. No cell phones, no computers, no PlayStations. Many of our parents may not have had TVs until they were our age or older. Sounds terrifying, I know. And although I consider myself something of a tech advocate, this really should make us stop and reconsider our obsessions.

Maclean's magazine published an article once where they referred to us as 'the iPod generation'. Now think about it. Of all the legacies we could leave behind for our children, does it really have to be an Apple product? I mean, seriously. We, as an entire generation, will be summed up and remembered for one singular piece of technology developed in our lifetime. It sounds so ... degrading. Why couldn't we at least be the 'portable music' generation? Of how about the 'communication' generation, that one's catchy. I'd even be okay with 'the generation that developed the most technological advancements' generation, even if it is a little wordy. I think what it comes down to is that the BIG issue isn't technology itself, it's the misuse of it.

In closing, I'd like to challenge you to think about the possible deeper meanings in the following lines of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men:

'Shape without form, shade without color
Paralysed force, gesture without motion
Between the conception and the creation
Between the emotion and the response
Falls the Shadow.
Life is very long.
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but a whimper.'