Technological take over
About two months ago, an OCCC student was devastated when the hard drive of her computer crashed.
Endless numbers of documents from years of work, along with thousands of amateur and professional photographs, were all lost.
Countless personal family pictures were all gone. This posed the question as to whether our society has become too dependent on the electronic devices we are so attached to.
“We are in an age where people want what they want, when they want it,” said Gwin Faulconer-Lippert, mass media communications professor. “We have become a society of media-on-demand and I think technology is fantastic.”
However, we may have lost track of how dependent we have become. These days, almost anything can be accomplished from a cell phone, like transferring money from one bank account to another or being alerted by text when your account balance is low. This can be done from the palm of your hand.
In this day and age it would be difficult to make a phone call without the numbers in a cell phone directory, because so many people rely on their cell phone as their primary phone book.
Most companies would not be able to operate if their power went out or there was a network failure because everything is done by computer these days. Even if we were able to do it by hand, without the use of computers, calculators, and other electronic devices, the question still remains whether anyone still knows how to do basic math or spell without spell check.
Without technology we would not have electricity or an automobile, so it is not all bad. There are a lot of things that technology has done to make life easier and save time. But, we need to be aware of this accelerating dependence and develop a back-up plan.
There will always be practical ways of keeping back-ups to electronic devices. One way to ensure you never lose all the files stored on a computer is to keep back-up disks of your data and do back-ups frequently. A plain paper phone number and address book is an alternative to relying only on a cell phone for information.
Items such as binders, planners and paper will never be obsolete and should be used as a back- up method to electronic devices.
Just because we can check our bank balance from our phone doesn’t mean that we should not monitor, balance and oversee our accounts on a regular and more personal basis.
No matter how hard we try, electronic devices will never be as stable as the human touch.
—Christina Barger
Staff Writer
