Here’s a scenario you can probably relate to: You are sitting around with your friends, discussing movies, and there’s a name on the tip of your tongue but, Oh! What is that name? He’s that dude, he plays that character, yeah, in that movie, with that director, and it may have been in theaters. Your probing remains too vague for there to be any hope of an answer, even with your collective brain power, and yet, Thank Zeus! Your friend has the latest smart phone, the most up-to-date iProduct. With a few carefully worded Google searches you can successfully remember that it was John Turturro that played the butler in Big Daddy. With the power of Google in your pocket, unlimited access to trivial information goes from the tip of your tongue to the tips of your fingers. My fear, however, is that that is where the information remains.
With this kind of unabated access to information, there is no longer a need for retention. Retention goes straight out the window. Thanks to the speed and ease of connectivity made possible by today’s phones, there no longer seems any purpose in trying to remember all of the roles John Turturro has played in his long-winded career. Especially since IMDB is a few clicks away, no matter where you are. And it’s not just actors and their roles, but all information—Why is there any need to waste the storage space in your brain when the phone can serve us as an external hard drive, of sorts.
It might seem like I’m being extreme, but think about the calculator. As calculators became more commonly used, the need to understand and do math became diminished to the point where even divvying up a bill or determining how much to tip a waiter is a challenge (but don’t worry, our phone can do that too). An overreliance on the calculator has reduced our ability to the most simple of math skills.
What’s to stop the same thing from happening to our memory? Do you even remember what happened last year, this past summer, or even last weekend without flipping through Facebook pictures first? Now that our phones are capable of giving us directions, downloading and storing entire libraries of books, paying our bills... they are almost as capable as us. If this reliance on our phones continues, our minds will become mush.
As an avid viewer, and stay at home contestant, of Jeopardy I tend to worry about the show’s future. A couple of months back, when I was in my living room, obnoxiously shouting out answers, competing for prize money I had no stake in, a commercial came on for IBM’s Jeopardy contest. An IBM supercomputer named Watson was designed and built to compete with the show’s best competitors. Not only did it compete, it destroyed them. Over the course of two matches, Watson earned $77,147, compared to the $24,000 and $21,600 that the mere humans racked up. While Jeopardy continues on for now, I wonder when the contestant pool will dry up. I mean, we already have shows such as Jeff Foxworthy’s “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” I would hate to see the day when Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader, the answer to which determines if you are a redneck, becomes Are You Smarter than Your Smart Phone, the answer to which will be no.
And yet, there is a solution. Just as you can still do math by learning and practicing and applying those skills, you can still exercise your brains. Turn off the cell phones, log off Facebook, and use your mind instead. Write a letter, memorize a poem, do the crosswords, play Sudoku. Anything to fight the technologic revolution. At the beginning, as technology and computers progressed, each new model was heralded as even more “user-friendly” than before. And yet, as technology surpasses what we once thought possible, it feels as if we are being forced to become more “computer-friendly” in every aspect of our daily lives
This has been an All Smiles Production.
