Rant & Rave
Rant & Rave
IS it just my imagination, or is technology getting a little out of hand? Technology affects perhaps too many aspects of our lives. Let’s rethink value
of high-tech toysFor children, there are toys, such as the Furby, Tamagotchi and the three-dimensional Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation. The Furby is said to be able to learn, Tamagotchi is the virtual pet, and Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation bring arcade games right into the home.
Children possess toys that their parents could not have dreamed up when they were children. Although children enjoy these toys, they have no real educational value.
It is not only children that are wired to their toys. A lot of teens and adults today carry pagers, cellular phones or both. There are technological advances in medical procedures as well, making possible many life-saving techniques.
However, the more technology advances, the more items are produced merely for our convenience. This allows American society to become more and more lazy. Take for example, remote controls. Today, in almost any home, you can find a remote for the television and maybe a separate remote control for the VCR, CD player or DVD machine.
THESE conveniences we could do without, but instead, we try to acquire more and more high-tech equipment. Does it take too much energy to get up to change the station or play a CD? How about a remote control for a car stereo? That's absurd; how far away could you be from your stereo in a car?
At a certain point, technology moves ahead of society. We wonder about the moral question of cloning though now we know that cloning human beings is a close possibility.
The film "Toy Soldiers" featured toys that were able to learn enough to try to take over and spread chaos through a town.
Then there's the Y2K dilemma. We've created all these computerized networks and have become dependent on their services for everything from banking to electricity. If the Y2K theory proves to be true, many computers will not know how to read the year 2000 and will shut down, resulting in disaster.
Furbies are banned from government offices because they are said to be able to "pick up" information, like spies.
We should be able to enjoy and appreciate some of the conveniences technology brings to our society. But rather than rushing to advance technology merely for our convenience, we should think about what we are creating and the reasons for our needs.
Laurynn Paet is a senior at Kaiser High School.
Rant & Rave is a Tuesday Star-Bulletin feature
allowing those 12 to 22 to serve up fresh perspectives.
Speak up by fax at 523-8509; by answering machine at 525-8666;
snail mail at P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu 96802;
or e-mail, features@starbulletin.com