On Another Skill Falling to Technology

Commentary, Life Lessons Comments (3)

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ -Abraham Lincoln

Another skill of general society is falling to the will march of technology; that of penmanship. Like the general skill of being able to remember your parents number or your friends numbers without looking at your cellphone, so too has technology taken the skill of penmanship.

Very few of the young (and they are getting younger) actually write anything anymore. More often it is typed, or sometimes not even that, as they are now given the actually power point presentation so that they can review it at home.

In the actually workplace, few people actually write anymore. You can tell the age of the crowd by who carries a pad into a meeting, vs a laptop. You can further tell the age by what’s on the pad, words vs a sentence and doodles. I find the tablet pc funny, because nearly no young person wants one. They don’t write, they like using them as art pieces. Older people (the Gen X, and above) like them, then find they turn on the onscreen keyboard and type anyway.

Since bad penmanship this will become a problem in the future, i suggest you save your children the pain of carpul tunnel syndrome and teach them to use a DVORAK keyboard at the same time. It takes about 6 months and you can switch between them easily. I know, i use it, and I swear by it.
If speech reconization ever manages to fill in the puncutation of spoken sentences, then the skill of typing will of course die. After all, why type when you can just say what you mean, or think at your pc (that’s personal computer which can mean everthing now used for computing.) Forcing you to think the punctuation may seem ackward, but you do it now when you type. After all, you know to hit the “.” at the end of sentences.

So now, let’s see, we can’t remember any long string of numbers, we can’t write really, not well enough so that it can be read, we aere losing our hearing and gaining more migrane sufferers because of computer screens, we still can’t figure out how the pyrmids were built, or some places in Athens, and there are still more working traps in myan temples than we can account for.

It’s sad, the skills and abilities we’ve lost to time, because no one could record it. Know the problem now? The thing you use to write, or store the information you want to store and keep forever, was obsolete the moment you bought it. Unless we keep information safe, we’ll lose it as we advance as a people, as a society, as a race.

Yet, onward i saw; onward.

OceansOfThought @ April 30, 2008