I never thought much about technology until I enrolled in a graduate course called the "Rhetoric of Technology" taught by Dr. Joe Amato, a former professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Joe, as he liked to be called, is a laid back sort of guy who left corporate America as an engineer to become a college professor, which was fortunate for me. You see it takes a gifted professor to turn the light bulb on in a student's head and change the way they view the world forever.
I imagine that the average person goes about their daily tasks and never really thinks about their relationship to technology. But everything we touch is technology from the alarm clock that wakes us up in the morning to the lights we turn off at night. Today, even human beings can be reproduced in a petri dish through the use of technology. In essence, we are technology in the making. This forever-changing word that we so often take for granted describes nothing more than how we use knowledge, tools, and systems to facilitate living or to improve the quality of our lives.
Indeed man has come a long way from chiseling language in rock to clinching million dollar deals over something called the super information highway. In the age of old, technology moved rather slowly, but today, action and reaction occur almost simultaneously. Computers and the Internet have literally changed the way we function and relate to the world. Together, they have created a global community without borders as the missing links between organizations, people, and nations. But is technology really all that wonderful?
As a writer, I will have to excuse myself from this dialogue because I just had a flashback of manual typewriters and the unforgettable IBM Selectric. Need I say more!? Nevertheless naysayers might argue that technologies are converging at a frightening rate. They wonder if the frantic pace will allow for careful and prolonged studies of biotechnology, for example, and its impact upon agriculture, the environment, business, or the control of diseases. They wonder if organizations will make an effort to adequately train their staff or will they even find the necessary skilled labor to remain competitive in a global market. Still, others argue that technology has made us lazy and less productive. Whereas we used to walk all over a building to find a co-worker, all we have to do now is page them or call them on their cell phone. No one ever asks if he or she really wants to be found.
Other critics might argue that we never used our total brain capacity anyway, and will probably never get that opportunity if we can eliminate a problem by flipping a switch or pushing a button. And let me not fail to mention the loss of privacy; that is quite another story.
Today, institutions of learning have integrated the use of technology into the classroom that will certainly take courses like Dr. Joe's to a whole new level. I can only imagine how such a course might even be conducted. I can only imagine how far one might truly see!
References
Centre for Economic Education. People and technology. Australian Study Topics Series. Retrieved April 2, 2003, from http://cee.org.au/library/pdf/pt1.pdf and http://home.vicnet.net.au/~econoed/pdf/pt2.pdf.
FutureWorld International. (April 1, 2003). When worlds collide: Technology and man converging. Retrieved on April 2, 2003, from http://www.futureworld.org.
Kay, Alan. (May 16, 2002). People and technology. (Insight Presentation Summary).