Technology: Is it the savior we think it is?

There is no doubt technology is remarkable with all that it is able to help us do, but I think it is worth looking at from both sides. We rely on technology more and more each day and expose ourselves to the possible failures some technology can have. In my English class freshman year, my printer broke the day before a paper was due, so I saved it on a flash drive and came in early to print it at school. Unfortunately, something happened between home and school that corrupted all the data on the flash drive and caused me to be unable to print it, and while Mr. Lentz was understanding, he still took off 10% on my final paper grade. That 10% meant the difference between an A and a B for my final grade. This is only one example of the shortcomings of technology. There is now a category of internet addiction disorders that didn't exist 20 years ago, but the scariest thing is, there is something that is causing our short and long term memory to decay: The Google Effect. This is when our brains decide to rely on the internet for a large portion of our knowledge, and actively forget things that we can easily access on the internet or device. You can see this active with something as simple as phone numbers. How many phone numbers do you know? 3? 4? Maybe even 5? I only really know 4, mine, my parent's, and my brother's. If you were to go back 20 years the average person would know twice that. While I don't disagree that technology's benefits outweigh the negatives ten-fold, it is worthwhile noting that there are negatives that a lot of people overlook.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/therapy-matters/201107/the-google-effect