by Terry Smith

Created on: October 08, 2010   Last Updated: October 09, 2010

When posed the question of society being controlled by technology, I was originally poised to argue against this one. What I mean to say is how can the human mind, a thing of infinite intricacy, of amazing free will and the ability, when used collectively, to solve almost any problem that we are faced with, be said to be influenced and affected by the technology that surrounds us to the point of being controlled.  However as I looked for arguments to support this theory, I found that nearly all my examples were rooted in a period of time that no longer seems to exist. When I look around me today I find the answer to the question, rather depressingly, to be a resounding yes.

From the minute children arrive in schools they are taught to use and rely on computers. Ask any child to work out the sum of two numbers and, with the help of a calculator, they will produce the correct answer every time. Take this electronic abacus from them, However, and you may as well ask them how many elephants it is to London. Likewise – and I am assured of this by a secondary school teacher friend of mine – teenagers of today regularly turn in excellently presented, perfectly spelt and, by and large, grammatically correct typed assignments. However, on recently marking one of her student's written assignments, she gave up in horror. Words were scrawled on the page, barely legible, and what was decipherable was almost entirely pigmy English so mangled and incoherent that it appeared more the work of a madman than the average B grade destined pupil. This had little to do with any physical effect of hand writing over typing and rather more to do with the lack of spellchecker being built into their text books. She assures me that they are all bright pupils and that many of them frighten her with their ability to work things out with the aid of modern technology – apparently one of her pupils has written and published several games in Java – yet without it they appear lost and confused.

So integrated into their worlds is this technology that my teenaged daughter cried as if she had lost a limb when I confiscated her laptop for a week as punishment.

“I might as well kill myself” She screamed as though in mortal pain. “How am I going to keep up with my friends without Facebook?”

It’s actually astonishing that I recognised my daughter to punish her in the first place. For the past three years she has navigated the house and, quite

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