The Computer and New Technoogy is DESTROYING Our Society

Honestly I think it is way to easy to reach and communicate with people now. So many ways. Now I have to talk to people all the time I would not have had to before things like texting and social networks made it so easy. On the plus side everybody has more information at their on thier PC/tablet/phone now then even the most wise and educated elites through out human history. Of course its always more fun to complain about the current genertion being lazy, dumb and without morals destroying society. That is a tradition as old as human history.

The best part of this is the OP has terrible grammar.
The irony is outstanding.

reply to post by Ghost375


Glad your amused by the grammar of the OP.

Maybe a bit of respect for your elders would not go astray.

Now go back to your facebook and stop bothering the adults.

It's not more difficult to "reach" somebody now, it's just easier for that somebody to filter/ignore you.

Our society can't really be "destroyed" because it is (and always has been) constantly changing. You have to learn to see things as they are - and not just from your own prospective. Father time waits for no one!

reply to post by bluestar.ranch


I kind of get what you are trying to convey here bluestar, but surely all is not negative with regards to technology.
The wealth of information at ones fingertips now is absolutely incredible - if you can sift the wheat from the chaff.

All of everything is currently being homogenized in one big stew with the resulting curds forming.
Some of the push with this stuff is nonsensical though - in my opinion,
Like this below:


Like any fad, the novelty will wear thin at some point. Hang in there.

Originally posted by bluestar.ranch
Briefly I am a "old retired worker" from several generations ago.....a long time before all the technology. I even remember "door to door sales" (today you would be arrested as a terrorist!!!!!! for carrying a briefcase.. (It might be a bomb!)

As there are fewer suburban and rural areas than before, of course the practice of door to door salesmanship has diminished.

I remember when you had to pick up the telephone to make a call to someone.. AND A PERSON ANSWERED, If they did not answer, you called again later.

How exactly has this changed?

Today, If I call someone and the "voicemail" does not work, the girl picks up the phone and says, "Sorry The voice mail not working you can't leave a message for John Doe"


I explain to the girl that if she got a pencil and paper she can WRITE MY NAME AND PHONE NUMBER AND HAND THE MESSAGE TO HIM" She is impressed! I cant reach people any more!!!! .. the more communications the HARDER it is to talk to someone! Facebook, Email, Twitters, I Phones, I Pads, Computers, Skypes, Texting.... ITS NO WONDER OUR ECONOMY IS SO BAD.. Sales people cant talk to anyone but machines!

You must have been talking to very uneducated girl...or a machine.

Well, folks this was all planned and its just part of the program...

Anyone else? can you not talk to people when you need to? Does todays gadgets and technology keep you from growing your business or making sales?

Not at all. There's such a thing as 'moving on with the times'. I remember back in the day when my father used to work as a manager for FedEx ; he sit at his office desk that was set up in my parents' room, and he would make phone call after phone call, while filling out virtual forms and excel spreadsheets on his huge Compaq Presario (one of the ones that look like the 5460 version).

And before that, you would be at the office on the workplace campus, filling out papers with no computer to use while using the turn-dial phone. And before that you would be using punchcards and a telegraph.

The point I'm trying to make is that technology is not destroying our society: Change is just destroying you.

The fact that this is a forum post on an internet website makes your argument invalid I think..

Originally posted by jimmiec
reply to post by freedomSlave

 

Actually, when i went to school we did not have calculators. We used a pen and piece of paper. Math, algebra problems were figured in your head. When calculators came along we were not allowed to bring them to school. It was considered cheating.

Hmmm........... Clearly we are the same age.
I like computers and tech and generally very good with them, but they have
a consequence on society,and not a good one.
However it is evolution in progress and therefore unstoppable.

Seldom do i see kids outside playing hide and seek or what have you , everything is indoors round a pc game game or an xbox.

reply to post by bluestar.ranch


Yes you are right. These new technologies do indeed destroy your civilization. Actually they destroy your culture. But that's the nature of things. Old culture goes, new culture with new values comes. There would hardly be any progress without this constant adaptation and change.

And funny that you try to build your theory whilst using a telephone as prime example. I think you just really shot yourself in the foot with that one, because the people from the early 1900's will have said the exact same thing about telephones what you say about computers now.

Its not destroying our society but its accelerating changes that were already underway.

Kids get parked in front of Xbox and PS3 because

a) Their parents cant be bothered, or have no time with massive work commitments (to stay afloat)
b) Everybody has been convinced by the media that predators lurk on every corner ready to snatch kids in broad daylight. It does happen but probably not more often than it always did.
c) There is no social cohesion to areas. In the old days kids were looked out for collectively to an extent. In these days what families remain are isolated islands. Not part of a community. Nobody wants involved with anybody else.

None of this is caused by the xbox. Its an accelerated evolution of the social changes that started in the 60s. Blaming technology is like blaming an efficient messenger for the message.

Other things are just efficiency improvements to increase corporate profitability. If people really valued the personal touch they would pay a premium for it and the companies with automated systems would suffer. People bitch and moan but they wont pay in enough numbers to effect the change.

The only real power to change anything any of us have left is our spending power. The interaction between individual spending power and the organisational power of social media hasn't really hit home yet. People haven't realised they can collectively take massive corporations down by changing their habits for short periods. I'm waiting for that to happen. Eventually it will.

The Computer and New Technoogy is DESTROYING Our Society,

Thank God, right? The thing has needed an overhaul in, like, forever.

Actually, it's re-making our society, it just feels like destruction to some.

I feel that Technology has dumbed down the world entirely to a point that when there is even a small power outage people freak out

reply to post by bluestar.ranch


How do you think the guy that lived before the invention of the telephone would feel?

"Back in my day we actually sent letters or had to walk to someone's house to talk to them."

It's all relative. Today's 30-somthings remember VCR's and could say, "In my time we had to go to a store to get a movie -- none of this instant streaming!"

Technology is neither good nor bad -- it is how it is utilized that matters. Even old telephones with a switchboard operator and "party lines" were a form of technology. Would you then contend that even those are bad and helped destroy society?

I see where you are coming from, and I feel it more and more as I get older. Kids today...they have no idea what it was like before the internet!

reply to post by MystikMushroom

At least when you had to go to a store to get a video you saw other people and perhaps bumped into friends. Streaming movies online does not require you to go where others might be.

Better yet, drive-in theatres required you to watch the movie with others. You could not take it home with you and watch it privately. Again, this bolstered our ability to interact socially with others.

And then long before that all movies were plays. They were real-time. The actors had to do the show on the spot. They had to actually do the show every time and earn it each time. It was a close bond between actor and audience. You really knew the actor on a deeper, more intimate level.

Same thing happens when we have fun by going online instead of going to the local bowling alley or pool hall. We may choose to play pool or bowl online, but we will miss out on the social aspect.

Technologies shelter us and isolate us from each other and make us more mechanical. The day you can convince me that living online is good for the world, I'll think otherwise. But, honestly, this tech lifestyle kills the body (obesity, loss of muscle) and kills the mind (loss of social skills).

We're living like machines but it's not working because we're flesh and blood. We require exercise. We require each other. We require open interaction with others using our full five senses.

Our diet requires 4 parts human and 1 part technology. But it's skewed to 4 parts technology and 1 part human right now. And this is what's causing so many problems in our modern world. Let me tell you something ominous. The only things that'll survive this are the robots and computers.

Well, whats different for an old school person like me is that I don't have to got to a library to find something out. Or wait for it to come on TV. If I remember a factoid from something I have learned over my life time, I just type that in and Wallah!

I also enjoy the forum atmosphere where a multitude of perspectives are eager to put forth their expertise on any given subject, real time. its always night or day somewhere in the world.

I know more and have learned much in the last couple years. More than all my lives before the Internet combined.

Originally posted by jimmiec
Like my grandma said 50 years ago. " That damn TV will be our ruination!" Grandma was always right. It has been down hill from there. The days of doing math in your head or with a pencil and paper are long gone. Technology is dumbing down the world little by little. There will be unintended consequences.

Grandma was not always right.. NO ONE IS. but our older folks ARE SMARTER.. Maybe not with tech but the simple things, they are way smarter at the simple things and what they know from before history is a cycle..

Originally posted by freedomSlave

Originally posted by jimmiec
Like my grandma said 50 years ago. " That damn TV will be our ruination!" Grandma was always right. It has been down hill from there. The days of doing math in your head or with a pencil and paper are long gone. Technology is dumbing down the world little by little. There will be unintended consequences.

What you said reminded me I saw last week a new clip about how the abacus is making a comeback here in Canada among some of the children .

The abacus, that ancient, no-batteries-required, bead-based calculator, is making a comeback in after-school programs across Canada. The schools, which are modelled after programs common across India and Japan, use the low-tech tool to teach children to perform complex calculations without the help of pen or paper. Dozens have taken root in Canada over the past eight years, mostly in areas dense with Southeast Asian immigrants.

Abacus article

The period 2700–2300 BC saw the first appearance of the Sumerian abacus, a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system.[6] Some scholars point to a character from the Babylonian cuneiform which may have been derived from a representation of the abacus.[7] It is the belief of Old Babylonian[8] scholars such as Carruccio that Old Babylonians "may have used the abacus for the operations of addition and subtraction; however, this primitive device proved difficult to use for more complex calculations"

wikipedia abacus

An abacus is a primitive calculator
The days of really doing math in our heads have been long long gone before me and you were here .

If the parent are not making sure their kids know to do math with out a calculator than that is their own fault as they are the ones providing their kids with a calculator

edit on 26/2/13 by freedomSlave because: (no reason given)

I don't know WHEN you were in HIGHSCHOOL but when I WAS which was not that long ago, Calculators were GIVEN OUT and were MADE TO USE... We had to LEARN HOW TO USE the damn things.. The new calculators are not easy to use.. If it is helping you with harder things the harder it is to learn how to do that on IT. I see this as a cancellation effect.

I think the problems lies with the morals that are not evolving at the same pace then technology and computers.

They say a crowd has a maturity of a 10 year old...now imagine a whole planet.
We aren't educated to enhance our society, we are educated to fit in it, no matter how shallow can be the status quo of conformity.

We are educated to be good pawns of a system that benefits the few compared to actually thinking towards improving, refining, re-defining society's impact on the well being and happiness of ALL humans.

Luckily, we all still have the freedom to pick and choose which technologies we would like to use to communicate. Although, I see a trend where that may not be the case... Like if you want to apply for a job, you are frowned upon if you don't have a LinkedIn account, or in some cases a Facebook account. Of course, if you have these accounts, you get connection requests from people in your past you might not necessarily want to connect with.

I personally lean toward old-school telephone conversations and email as opposed to mass-exposure technologies like Facebook and Twitter. I laugh when I see four people sitting at a table for lunch... all staring at their iPhones and not paying attention to each other. But, I realize that's the new culture, it's their decision and I respect that. I would never, ever want to squelch technology growth, as so many other good things come from that.

At the end of the day, just like everything else... do what is true to you and don't worry about everyone else. Just don't force technologies on people.

I disagree with most which has been said.

Communication is easier and far more efficient than it EVER was, thanks to the internet.
While I am sitting here, I am checking my emails in minute intervals, communicating with clients. I talk on Skype, email, message boards. I can meet real people on social sites. I can share ideas and thoughts within seconds all over the planet.

You are seriously saying that writing (paper) mails or transporting messages via horse carriages was "better", where each way of communication took days, if not weeks? Laughable.

You know, my ex wife I met on myspace, my current wife as well. We are happily married. How does the "internet" destroy society? What's so bad about it?