Bet she wish she had an iPhone on her

However much I love the convenience of technology I have a nagging worry that it is actually making us stupid. Think of how much we depend on spell checks, GPS, Outlook calender, phone books to organise our lives. As we rely more and more on technology to sort out the simplest aspects of our lives, potentially we might forget vital skills.

For instance think about the time before you had a mobile phone, scary right. Now I bet you could remember your home phone number, your friends' numbers, your parents' office numbers along with alarm codes and lots of other numberical strings. To this day I can recall at least 3 or 4 of my secondary school friend's land line numbers. These are numbers I haven't dialled in 10 years. Yet I know none of my friends mobile numbers, I barely remember my own. I am dependent on my phone memory to keep these numbers safe. Every time I lose my phone I lose access to all my contacts. This can be particularly tricky. When I lost my wallet in a festival recently I was very nearly stuck in Suffolk as I didn't know any number I could ring for help save 999. Luckily my phone had the tiniest bit of battery left due to a fortuituous decision to use it sparingly.

This is a particular instance of how technology can make us dumber. But I think it is the general expectation that technology creates which is more dangerous, our very mindset. With a smart phone constantly linked to the internet, any question can be answered, any fact can be retreived. This access makes us complacent and intellectually lazy. Why bother to study anything, why bother to learn because any fact can be easily retrieved at the flick of a thumbnail. This raises a paradoxical situation whereby we are hungry for facts but unable to remember them because our short term memories are shot die to over-dependence on technology