The Non-Archival Character of Modern Technology

SEE HERE I always get a kick out of people that imagine technology is a solution to everything. As often as not technology is more of a problem because it holds out such promise it has the capacity to create tipping points everywhere and sometimes these just run you into a brick wall. I was listening to a student presentation on the "Cloud" and all the potential that "Cloud Computing" would offer and it just reminded me of all the other hype I've been exposed to over the years. Somehow the next big thing is always going to solve our problems. I never knew I had so many problems and that some electronic doodad or other was going to be my salvation.

Now I have students who seem incapable of doing anything without talking on a cell phone or texting someone. I'm a techie and I like technology, but I think it should make us more independent, more capable and not more dependent and less capable. Unfortunately today most of my students can no longer write cursive and can't do much basic arithmetic without a calculator. I don't think that's an improvement. This Google thing just points up how technology offers you a capability, but if it doesn't work out, "Oh well!" and the rug is yanked out from under you. My basement is an archival storage site for quite a lot of trailing edge technology that was once the hope of the ages. Now it's just junk! Old computers, old floppy disks in several sizes, a zillion flash drive starting at a few megabytes and scaling up to many gigabytes. Has any of this stuff made my life better? Maybe in some marginal ways, but in other ways it actually drains the humanity out of life. We should probably all step back and ask some basic questions about where all this is going and if we really want to go there.