Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Inspired Progress

I believe that God inspires men to advance technology and He wants us to take advantage of those advances. The end of the Dark Ages was marked by the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, and the printing of the Bible. Shortly afterward Columbus discovered America, which would eventually provide religious freedom to all. We are now in the Information Age, and our great legacy is the Internet. The most common usage of the Internet may not be wholesome or uplifting, but God still wants us to utilize this amazing tool to spread His Word.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Lost Art

Writing is becoming a lost art. This can be largely accredited to technology’s growing influence. Emails and text messaging have brought about a new and shrinking vocabulary consisting of phrases like “lol, snds gr8! ttyl.” For most people this is the only writing they do. Meanwhile the engineers and other technical people who develop technology largely despise writing and avoid it at all costs. If we don’t act now to reverse this trend we will, as a generation, miss out on utilizing the most durable and powerful medium of communication.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Technology Priorities

When I saw the headline “Researchers Develop Bionic Contact Lens” I immediately thought of the coke-bottle glass wearing individuals with complex eye issues finally receiving relief through the magic of technology. And yet the focus of the article, and seemingly the research itself, was not on improving vision but on taking gaming and personal computing to the next level. Indeed, the only sentence to the contrary came near the end, “Maybe the technique could even create sight aids for visually-impaired people.” I’m all for cool technology and sweet new games, but our priorities are getting fatally skewed.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Knowledge vs. Wisdom

Technology deteriorates wisdom. As text messaging and email become more popular, communication suffers. As the knowledge of civilizations becomes accessible with the click of a mouse, individual thought vanishes. I have a wealth of knowledge attained from movies and T.V. shows, and it is not uncommon for me to say something funny and my wife respond with “What is that from?” Granted, I often have the answer ready, but it is something of a reality check when something funny is actually an original thought. People are smart and capable of learning vast amounts of information, but when people spend all of their time taking in data – Googling, checking YouTube, crawling Wikipedia for hours on end – one must wonder how much time they actually spend thinking.