"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!