Marshall McLuhanisms

With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.”

Invention is the mother of necessities.

The road is our major architectural form.

Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images.

“I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”

IS TECHNOLOGY MAKING US STUPID?

1. Before you read the article, answer the questions:

I. Do you think that technology is having its influence on modern people?

2. Which way do you think technology is influencing us? Is technology making us stupid or is it stimulating our thinking?

3. Read what J. Pinto thinks about technology ans then say whether you agree with his position.

(Jim PIinto lives in San Diego, California. He is a speaker, writer, author, and technology futurist. He is also the founder of a U.S. company called Action Instruments)

J. PINTO: When you rely on technology, you don't think for yourself.

We have become so dependent on technology that we're losing our ability to solve problems and remember the most basic information. Whenever we need to solve a problem, we turn to a machine. If we need an answer to a question, we look it up on the internet. If we need a phone number, we look it up on our cell phones. I've seen people use a calculator to multiply single-digit numbers, like two times seven. When you rely on technology to think for you, you don't think for yourself.

The first thing to suffer is our memory. We store all the information we need on machines. We don't try toremember birthdays because they are stored in our electronic organizers. We don't try to remember appointments because they are noted in our calendars. We stop relying on our memories because we know we don't need to remember anything anymore.

Technology has harmed our communication skills, and, in particular, our language skills. We use electronic translators. We depend on word processors to correct spelling and grammar mistakes. In general, e-mails and texts are very badly written. We are either losing language skills because we've never learned them, or because technology makes learning obsolete.

How many times have you been focusing on one thing, such as reading a book or having a conversation, when your cell phone has rung, and you've turned your attention to that, instead? We live in a state of being constantly interrupted by technology, and this prevents us from being able to focus on one thing at a time.

When something has no quick, easy solution, we tend to move on to something else. We've become so reliant on technology that we've stopped challenging ourselves.

Technology does not stimulate creativity. It kills it. It prevents us from original thinking. Instead of thinking for ourselves, we find it easier to look something up on the internet. What needs to be taught in school is the ability to moderate and balance the use of technological tools in order to develop and stimulate our brains to solve complex problems that computers cannot solve. Technology helps us to get information and results. It's like an automobile that helps us to go faster, but we

must still exercise our muscles to get around. We must learn to balance technology and our own natural abilities, to use our brains as well as our machines.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 763