I read a post about this. REALLY? According to the post the company that created it was founded in 1989. So it stands to reason that people got around for more than One Thousand and Eighty-nine YEARS without GPS.
Seriously, technology isn’t a new concept. We could ask; “How did we get along without the pully system?” or “How did we get along before the wheel?”
Yes I am using extremely old ‘technology’ to make my point. People got along. We walked either by biped or quadruped before the wheel. We carried things by hand and broke backs before the pully system. We didn’t know any better because nothing ‘better’ was out there.
What is the saying? “Necessity is the mother of invention.” If we didn’t need it (or people weren’t lazy ;P) we wouldn’t invent anything. And can we really say that new technology is a good thing? Let’s take GPS for an example. We got along great before. In fact, people knew their towns better, I think, when they had to know their way around. People talked more. Yes, you sometimes had to stop and ask direction from the corner gas station. You had to have basic conversational skills. Both giving and receiving. You had to learn how to give directions to your ‘new place’ in a form that the other person would understand. Do they drive by road signs or landmarks… yes, that was a thing. You did use, “the corner where the old barn stood” as a directional tool. When my kids were little, when I got lost, I would say that we were on an adventure. We always got to where we needed to. No one was ever worse off for having taken the ‘scenic’ route. In truth, some of our favorite memories were of us having an adventure. We always ended up right where we were suppose to be.
GPS isn’t the only technology that I believe has made our lives better and worse at the same time. Cell phones. Or more accurately, these small computers we carry around. Before now, I never would have thought that something could bring humanity together and pull it apart so drastically at the same time.
Technology will either be our saving grace or our distruction.
As Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park) said; “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
