Modern-day electronics have major setbacks as well as advantages.
*Somewhat* recently, Encyclopedia Britannica announced that their future editions of the encyclopedia will no longer be printed on paper. Well, what if, all of a sudden, some major electro-magnetic pulse brought on by a celestial mass wipes all of their backups clean? History would then be...well, history. This whole craze for smaller, more portable data and information results in greater risk of loss in the tangible world. It also is what causes major self-esteem issues, and unnecessary purchases brought on by ready consumers. Somehow, almost everyone I know has an iPhone. Why? You see them everywhere, you like how it looks and feels, you feel compelled to have your own. There are advertisements on television, and in newspapers, and on billboards, and in magazines. Okay. Time for an iPhone.
But, what real benefit do you garner from it? Honestly.
You might argue, for example, "It's more lightweight," or "It runs faster," or maybe you just like the appstore they have. But why do you need it? To play games? To be up-to-date with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram every single second? To take pictures of someplace and upload them to the internet that very second with a footnote "My Trip to New York?" To watch donkey porn on the go (strange, I know, but it happens)?
Today's world is obsessed with three words.
Instant.
Instant.
Instant.
We want things at the tips of our fingers, as a puppet and his puppeteer. We want to be able to control anything, anywhere. But, even before the techno-years, we had workarounds. Our primeval instincts are slowly dwindling away. Can we honestly remember what an object looked like anymore? No, so we take pictures. Can we find where a certain house is on a certain street? No, so we use Apple Maps. (Which, if you don't know, doesn't work anyways.) Do we know why ice floats? No, so we Google it, or go to Wikipedia. There used to be methods for these before "instant." Objects? Sketch an image on a piece of paper. Usually, people carry around some sort of notebook, or scrap paper. Going somewhere for the first time? Ask a pedestrian. It's not difficult. Wondering why ice floats? Go to the library, an obsolete place full of information that nobody utilizes anymore.
My point being; what if all of a sudden a massive natural disaster electrically wiped all of our information straight off our hard drives? What would we have left? By my estimates, books will be obsolete approximately 250 years from now. Thus, the result of a massive data purge would effectively destroy civilization if we continue down the path to electronics.
Don't completely rely on what is close, is what I am getting at. Rely instead on what is always there. Need to know a word? As an exercise, try going to a dictionary instead of going to Google to type "define modicum." And, in the process, learn the words above and below. And maybe on the previous page. Soon enough, your array of verbal vocabulary will make you sound smarter. Those little changes, if we all try them, could potentially influence society to raise its standards, to become one with the physical world again.
...did that make any sense to you? Ugh, I'm going back to Facebook...
