Emily Goldberg ’12
Web Sports Editor
Countless times I have stomped into my kitchen to tell my Dad about my latest technology problems and plead to him that he helps me fix it. If my printer isn’t working, my document didn’t save, or that file isn’t opening, luckily he can usually help me fix my various problems. However along the way I’m almost always told the classic story,
“When I was a kid, I didn’t have a computer, I hand wrote all my papers!”
“Well, thanks for the story Dad, but that isn’t really helping my printer work…”
We have so much technology in our everyday lives that some would argue we don’t have to do anything any more. Google will pretty much solve anything, calculators will do our math for us, and at any given moment there’s usually at least one way of communicating with someone even as far away as in a different country.
As a student, I do not agree that we don’t have to do anything due to the influx of technology, but I do agree that it does make things easier. Often when I was younger I would ask my parents what certain words meant. They would pull out the dictionary and tell me to look it up. Instead of taking that extra minute to manually sift through the pages, I would let the computer do that for me by going directly to dictionary.com.
However when does technology cross the line? When should we really be doing things without the help of anything with a screen?
The language lab at Staples is one line technology crosses that it most definitely shouldn’t. This is where instead of making tasks easier and more efficient, it makes them more difficult and more time consuming, completely defeating the purpose.
Every Thursday my Spanish class uses the lab, and I’m forced to use those dreaded headphones that seem completely unnecessary to me. I do not understand why the school spent the great amount it did to enable students to talk to someone across the room via headphones instead of just walking across the room to talk to them in person.
Not only does this seem unnecessary but it becomes inefficient when my class spends most of our time in the lab trying get the groups to hear each other at all, or even figure out why my partner’s voice was manipulated in the headphones and sounds so high pitched you would think you were talking to a chipmunk. (Yes, it has happened.)
It’s great that Staples has so many resources, but I think some of them can be reconsidered and used as money saving opportunities especially in these economic times.
Sometimes I wonder if things were better off back in the day when my dad was a kid, when there wasn’t all of this confusing technology that sometimes makes things more difficult and time consuming.
“When I was a kid I walked five miles in the snow to school.” Ok Dad, maybe you’re exaggerating a bit there, but I still appreciate the rides to school every morning.
