On Friday morning at 3:00am, my alarm clock went off. The consistent blaring just kept yelling at me to get myself up and get moving. My reason for having to get up, was that I had to drive my boyfriend, Ken, to the Indianapolis airport in order for him to catch his 6 o'clock plane departure.Now I've driven to Indy many times, but that doesn't mean that I know my way around when it comes to the heavy traffic and sudden divisions in the road. Normally I am all ready to go with either printed out Google map directions or a Tomtom, but this time I had neither; more importantly, I didn't have a printer to print out directions. Our on the way journey wasn't going to be scary at all, because Ken had a smartphone that had a GPS on it. For my lonely trek back though, I had my regular phone without any directions or any sort of GPS system at all. Realizing this at 3:00am can be a major stress attack. I was tired, and if i just tried to use some sort of map that might be in my car's trunk, then I was most likely going to get myself lost into some abyss within Indianapolis or beyond. After my major freak out, I ran to my housemate's room, and woke her up, begging to use her smartphone as my homebound GPS. She of course allowed me to borrow it, and she is the reason I am not wondering the distant traffic waters in a far far away land right now.
With my lovely Friday morning explained, I am drawn to a major affect that technology will most likely have on our new generation; people will most likely lose the ability to read maps. Personally, I feel as if I am pretty decent at reading maps. I took a Geography class, and our teacher found it extremely important for all of us students to be able to completely understand how to read and follow a map. Will that be the same for our future generation though? My guess is most likely not. I may not be the most credible person to state this, but I feel the teaching of how to use maps will be discontinued and replaced by how to use a GPS or Tomtom. It may still be taught to particular people who have an eagerness to learn how to correctly read a map, but other than those people, it is doubtful that teenagers will continued to be taught.
Everyone once knew how to make fire with flint and steel too. The replacement of knowledge of one technology for a more effective one isn't a new practice, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.
ReplyDeleteHaha, This was a pretty clever blog post! I agree that technology is losing knowledge in some aspects in our evolving world, but are they really necessary? Map reading is just like the calculator because we know how to do long division and multiplication, but we use a calculator to get to the next problem quicker. Maps are not difficult, but think about driving to Indianapolis and having to make quick decisions using only a map. I guess the way I look at technology is that we are more efficient because of it. I feel that we are much lazier people now then in past generations in some sense, but not in such a manner that we cannot compensate for it. If we don’t use the tools we have to solve problems, we would have to spend more time working on something. Thus, slowing our advancements in knowledge. I really liked the creativeness on your non-prompted blog. I caught myself constantly questioning where you were going with your story, which intrigued me and kept me reading. I like the story; I felt that you had a great correlation to class, it was an awesome angle to approach, good job.
ReplyDeleteHey thanks, Logan! :)
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