"StupidUs"

Today I heard a debate at CBC News Online, talking about the Internet: “Is the Internet making us Smarter or Stupider?”, and I also got another idea from the audio to share: “we know what a tool can do for us, what about what a tool can do to us?”. Yes, this is a very good question. Do we wonder how do we behave in front of a computer or in a world that most part of a communication is done electronically?

We know that Marshall McLuhan once said that “technology is an extension of ourselves”, and what does technology do to us? Today, we can easily go out to have a lunch and find many, if not all, people in a restaurant talking through some electronic device, we are just addicted at talking with (with?) our devices. This is our common behavior. If people need to do a research, most of them go directly into the internet to look for it – it is like if the internet had something that would stick on us and we cannot think about anything else then internet: “Internet is my solution!”. Wake up!

It is easy to fit than in some kind of Productivity Paradox – not only because we can spend so much time learning how to do something new, through some technology, but also, because sometimes we can forget our duties, just by “playing” online – chatting, gaming, reading something irrelevant… Because internet is full of crap and worthless things at the same time that it has a lot of important and good things to deal with.

So, yes! Internet makes things easier and at the same time, makes us waste our time. We do not have to think a lot about that. People get distracted from anything that moves. Internet moves all the time, internet has some life that we cannot understand anymore, and in many ways we can behave as if the internet were powerful then us! Even we created it. Stupid!

To Kill

Harris and Klebold, students, arrive at school in Columbine, Colorado, United States of America. They then enter on it and a few minutes later these two guys start shooting other students and dropping bombs wherever they go – a lot of people die. They finally kill themselves right inside the school. This is not a movie. This is not a book. This is not fiction. It really happened in April 20, 1999. We first create weapons it to hunt and feed, than we start defending ourselves from possible enemies or from nature, later we hurt people to gather information (I personally don’t think this is an excuse) and today, well, today we almost do not use it to hunt.

A long time ago, we used stones as a tool to hunt. Moreover, if we could hunt, we could eat! It was a practical use of a weapon and it helped us to survive and develop new ways to obtain food, it was new technology that at that time had a purpose.

As time goes by, people developed new purposes for stones! Yes, we found out that we could not only hunt, but hurt! And these two little letters make a big difference in creativity. That was when we invented more types of weapons, and people could use it in many ways of hurting. It was a time to defend ourselves from enemies, conquer lands, to get back heritages, and sometimes we could even use it to have some food. The development of weapon changes the rhythm and objectives.

Today, we are in a mess. We no longer have control on what we are doing and weapons became dangerous. Our society has so many technologies around new researches of arms and almost everyone have access to guns. We became a violent civilization (mess + free access to weapon = civilization?), where to have a weapon is a powerful thing or even safe. Cops have weapons to protect a community from criminals, government have weapons to keep enemies way from their lands, women have weapons to feel safe, men have weapons to show their power, and do teenagers have weapons to kill?

This is how we are using our weapons today. Wake up! Those two teenagers used guns, that they bought on internet to kill their colleagues, this was not something that we had thought before, when we created guns. We are not following the right rhythm of this technology’s development, because maybe, we are not ready to have it and to use it! Are we still using this technology properly or as an useful extension of us? Are we developing new ways of weapons and forgetting to expand our brain to learn how to deal with such dangerous technology? Isn’t this technology much more advanced than we can live with? People are maybe behind this technology expectation.

Technology as Status

As Chris Anderson, Wired editor, said; technology should be/ have into one to four of the following stages to be a success or popular:

- Critical price (people need to be able to buy it);

- Critical mass (should reach 20% of target);

- Replace another technology (as paper money and credit cards);

- Commodity (essentially free).

However, sometimes we may find a group of people (and let's easily include ourselves?), that cannot afford a type of technology, as a cellphone, because we are not part of a hypothetical company's target. So, for us, the new device does not have a critical price, the technology is not free, but even thus, we think we need it "to survive".

And we buy it. We buy it because we have been trained by television, by society, our friends, cellphones advertisements, that to be "someone" we must own an Iphone's latest version. Is it true? Since when my cellphone is more powerful than my brain? Technology becomes a status. Status that we create to split society (and to feel better? How?). 

And as cellphones becomes “better and better”, we stop being humans and start being robots. We start living as someone told us to, and we do not know who we are, or even who told us to be like this! People classify each other’s importance by the type of device we have, we can permit someone’s entrance in society only if he/ she has this cellphone. And so, we do not eat the dessert for a few weeks, we do not buy a book we need to read, but we buy the cellphone.

Now it is easy to include ourselves in society. This was our call to have the cellphone and to do not “waste” money with food or books. Now we can play a fantasy life. Let’s all pretend that we are better people now that we have the latest version of an “I beautiful phone”. This is our decision, right? Humans decided to be like that, and to act as robots that do not think or feel. After all, we need this technology to survive.