Technology Is Not Making Us Stupid, We Are Making Technology Stupid

I am appalled at those who are against technology. Truth be told, I am one of those, but I am not against technology itself. Rather, I abhor the way technology is used. It seems as if the more we know about the world, the less we know about ourselves. We have allowed machines to do all the work for us. As mentioned in a previous post; they tell us what to do, how to do it, and everything else about the world. Modern technology has eliminated the use of creativity, knowledge, talent, memory skills, and mind buffers. Laziness has become an epidemic, and it is not because technology has allowed or forced it upon us, we have allowed it to happen.

People always use all these new inventions as an excuse to be less human (dumber, lazier, easier, slower, etc.) but even with all this around us, nothing's really changed. Since the invention of the wheel people have been working hard to come up with ways to work less. And this doesn't make the general population any less stupid. People have always had the capacity to be perverted, stupid, ignorant, and lazy. We see examples of this in the Bible. Moses was barely gone for three days and people began worshipping a golden calf. (An aside, the spell check claims 'worshipping' only has one 'p'. Perfect example of people...) After spending this entire time in the desert, mysteriously and miraculously receiving food every day, seeing the Red Sea part, and all kinds of other signs, Moses takes a long weekend off TO TALK TO GOD and the rest is history. Read Proverbs 7. Or Song of Solomon. People are no more perverted now than they were back then, it's just more accepted. It's not that technology has made us any worse of a race, we have used technology to our advantage to express our ideas, visions, and thoughts. Most of those turn out to be homosexual, desires of the flesh, ridiculous, or just plain dumb.

Technology has made things better, faster, easier, and dumber. But only because we have made it that way. There are no buffers, censors, or guards on the internet. Anyone can publish anything about anything or anyone. The most common man now has a voice. Before modern technology, you had to be somebody, you had to prove yourself worthy, you had to do something memorable in order to obtain a voice, or some room in the public eye. It has never been about giving the public what they want, it was giving them what they need. FDR's fireside chats were the best chicken soup for the concerned American citizen. Had they known he was in a wheelchair - he might have never even been made president. Oh, but what about Obama? Is it possible we only voted him in because he's black. Put both presidents side by side strictly on non-visual debates (radio, newspapers, even live IM chats) and McCain is the better choice. More qualified, more serious, more experience. Sprite is dead wrong.

Over the past 50 years we have invented and improved the technology necessary to give Joe the Plumber a voice. Let me tell you something, Joe the Plumber has nothing to say. Flooding the markets with useless, pointless, unintelligent banter blocks the path of the poignant, important, necessary, and truthful. The righteous, the beautiful, the bold. Letting the common man say and do what he wants on TV, Internet, and Radio only allows the rest of the common men to see, hear, feel, and experience the things they already want and do without having to think it themselves. It makes the lazy lazier and the dumb dumber. Let's say a mouse wants a piece of cheese, and knows it needs that piece of cheese, but it needs to go through a maze to get that piece of cheese. Now a smarter mouse appears on the TV in front of it and shows the other mouse exactly how to go through the maze to get that piece of cheese. The end result is no one accomplishes anything. The dumber one knows it needs the piece of cheese, and the smarter one knows how to get it. The adage "teach a man to fish" comes to mind.

We are spoiling ourselves by giving us too much of ourselves, resulting in wanting even more of ourselves. Television, movies, and music are full of drug use, sex, and all those things God warns us about. The more they are shown on television, the more the dumb people want to have them. This is the genius behind advertising. Show the beautiful people having fun with a particular thing and the ugly people will want it, thinking it will make them beautiful. Same with the cool people. Who makes these rules anyway? Who is to say what is cool and what is not? There was a time when literacy was cool. If you could read, you were instantly popular. Now, failing classes seems to be the cool thing to do. The better you succeed at failing, and the crazier your reason is for doing so, the more you are respected for it. Where did we go do wrong? Technology has not made anyone dumber, we have made technology dumber. The Internet was invented around the time of WWII, solely for the military to communicate on a private line. Over the next forty years it was developed for personal use (Al Gore will take the credit for it) and is now the free-blog, porn-bot, scammer-heaven that all the common people dreamed about.

We live in a microwave generation. Everything has to be instant, super-fast, easy to digest. People don't want to read anymore (not even a single paragraph), and they don't even want to watch clips longer than 3 minutes. Television and internet has not done that to us. We have forced these media devices to teach us these rules. People have no interest in anything because there are too many things to interest us. We can watch TV on our phones now, so while waiting in line at the bank you can catch up on the latest episode of I Love New York. However, the line only takes 6 minutes to go through, so you can only watch something for 5 minutes. Better watch the Cliff's Notes version. People follow the gods they believe in. Media and money are the new American gods. If we make these new technologies Christ-centered, people would become Christ-centered. But NO! That is Un-American and I am unpatriotic if I feel that the country should be entirely Christian. Look, God tells us Jesus is the only way. If you don't want to believe that, that's fine. God can handle it. Just don't build a golden calf. If Muslim countries can force the entire population to be Muslim or be killed, we can at least *encourage* American citizens to be a little more righteous and Christ-focused. We can show how the homosexual, gangster, athiest, pimp, player, hustler and whore lifestyles really are undesireable as much as we portray them as "cool".

The intellects need to take back technology. We need to raise the standards of what good television, good music, and good internet is. We need to separate entertainment and education, or at least relate education to entertainment rather than creating the false hype that education must be entertaining. If we can educate while being entertaining rather than being entertaining while educating, we have succeeded. Life can begin improving with a few simple steps. We also need to make caring desireable. The only thing Americans know is the self. Take care of that first, and then possibly help others. We are so incredibly selfish, and it is the media to blame. Not the news, that is a totally different story, but internet, radio, and television are all self-enticing. I'm sorry that this post is so long, but it is a very important issue and there is much more to say about it. I hope some day soon I can have a round-table discussion about this in some form on some forum, preferrably television. Not that anyone would watch because this wouldn't be necessarily entertaining, candid, or scandalous. Plus it would upset most the television-viewing audience. But that is up to God to decide. If he wants to improve the gene pool, Hoover Dam will rupture one day and flood America. That and California will sink into the ocean. Let's hope it happens soon because God needs all the help He can get when it is time to invade Hell.

Don't be the lizard.