Portfolio: Final Exam Frame #1

Can a group of people change? Can an entire culture change for the better? These questions have yet to be answered. Some people would answer that our society is vastly different, and better, than it was two or three decades ago. Back then it was almost impossible to believe what we know is possible today. You would think that with our advanced technology and better education the United States would be a more intellectual place. It’s not. There are many people living here that can barely read or can’t read at all. Our world may be a better place with all the advancements we’ve made in our society, but intellectually we’re no better than we were decades ago. We have become too reliant on our own technology. It has become essential for our survival when it shouldn’t be. Technological advances mean nothing to our culture if we forget everything we can do without technology.

Technology has been both a blessing and a curse on the way we function as a whole. It has helped us to make advancements in science that we never thought were possible, but this came at a price. We understand the way the brain works better than we ever have before. This means nothing when “one-fifth of the population is illiterate” (Meredith). We may be smarter as a country, but as individuals we still know nothing. Geoffrey Meredith believes that although more people are getting degrees in college, most of them probably don’t even understand the words in front of them. The technology is doing the reading and the understanding for us. We take in more information than ever, but do we really understand what it’s saying to us? We need to read to understand how to use the technology given to us, but more people are finding that it isn’t essential because a lot of the time it is set up for you and you don’t really have to understand anything. Our society has become based on technology when it used to be based on literature. Technology has helped our education become more advanced as well. More people are graduating high school, going to college, starting careers, and having kids. Then those people are teaching their kids what it means to be an educated person. However, this might be as far as it gets when it comes to education. As Meredith states, “it’s likely to be the best educated that ever will be.” People are no longer learning to learn. They’re learning so that when they’re old enough they’ll get the best jobs that will pay the most money. It’s not learning if you don’t understand the meaning of what is being said to you. This problem can be applied to my life today, as well as other people’s lives.

I like to think that technology hasn’t affected me as much as everyone else. That can’t be true though because it seems like everything in today’s world is based on the newest technology. Growing up as a child, when the newest technology was still the very huge portable phone, I would always be reading and absorbing as much information and words as I could. I had always assumed that people knew what I knew but as I went farther along in school I understood that that assumption was wrong. While in school I used to be astounded when a classmate would be called on to read and they couldn’t pronounce some of the simplest words. I’ve grown used to this and it doesn’t amaze or surprise me anymore. This is the world that I’ve grown up in. People are doing more but understanding less. We are forgetting how to spell words and put sentences together cohesively so that they make sense. It may not shock me quite like it did when I was younger, but I still cannot fathom how some people can’t understand the simplest words or grasp a concept when it is right in front of them. I think that our world is definitely changing and advancing. The only problem with this is that as technology is progressing, we as a people are finding it hard just to keep up with and remember what we once were.

Right now we are at a technological high where everything is getting better and it seems as if nothing could go wrong. The only problem with highs is that once you reach them the only place to go is low. Look at our economy today. Wall Street is going down fast, faster than anyone could’ve ever predicted. This is what is going to happen to us. It’s either going to be technology that will go down or humans. Since we have created technology to live far past the lifespan of any human, it will be us that will fall to that low. The only solution to this is to relearn everything again, without the help of technology. If you said that to someone today, they would think that you’re crazy as would everyone else. Our very survival seems to depend on how far we can go technologically. What new medicines can we create so that no one can get sick? What new food can we create that will feed the hungry? What can we create so that we will never have to die? We are basing our very existence off of all of this. We can’t even remember how it used to be when we didn’t have technology and our world was so simple. The people that do remember though, the elderly, are finding it hard to keep up in this new modern-day technological society. “These are older people with little formal education” (Meredith). It is hard for us to fathom a culture where most people didn’t have a formal education, where some people didn’t go to school past the third grade. Even though the people we’re talking about that didn’t always have what we have now are our grandparents and our great-grandparents. That wasn’t very long ago either, maybe two or three generations ago. How could our world have changed so much between then and now? How could we have forgotten how things used to be? We let this happen to us. We welcomed the change with open arms because we thought it would make our lives simpler and make the world a better place. Our world is more complicated and faster paced than ever. Nothing is simple anymore, nothing is peaceful or easy. We’re fighting the demons overseas and the demons we have in our own lives. Technology did this to us. We let technology do this to the world.

I don’t think that all technology is bad, if I said that I’d be a hypocrite so would everyone else that owns a cell phone, which is basically the entire county. We can’t get rid of technology even if we wanted to because everything is connected to it. Our society would fall and crumble if it all went away one day. People wouldn’t be able to survive. While we still long for the basic human needs, food, water, shelter, added on to that is power and money. These are now our basic human needs and technology has created that for us. Technology is helping and destroying us. We have become too technologically connected. We have forgotten what it means to interact with an actual human being, instead we text them or comment them on their Facebook. Society can deal with change; after all we did survive all the ice ages. We don’t need to learn how to change because we’re doing just fine in that department. What we need to learn is how to grow as technology grows, change as our world changes. We can’t live in the past because then we won’t survive in the future. Society needs to evolve and accept change as it comes, but we still need to remember our basic human instincts. We need to remember how things used to be because although we can’t live in the past, we can learn from it to make our future better. Most importantly we need to remember all the sacrifices that were made to get society as far as it has gotten. We need to remember what has been given up and who’s been left behind in this process because without them we would be nothing. Society has changed since our ancestors first walked these lands and it will continue changing long after we are gone. As the people have changed, the technology has changed. We can never change that, we just have to deal with it.