Only if you let it...

Can technology make us dumb? Yeah, if you let it.

Damon Darlin's article hit the nail on the head. Techonology such as the web has liberated us from the time-consuming task of finding information that would difficult to get otherwise. However, that doesn't mean you will not have to use a book or a map at some point in time to find information, which means you better know how to use it.

I think some of us can remember a time before Word and Google. Granted some of us may have been 10 years-old, but we had to look up information the old fashion way: Going to library to check out a book, picking a phone directory or asking someone smarter than us to answer a question. Now information is just a click or a search away. Don't get me wrong, that's great. As someone whose parents couldn't afford a set of encyclopedias, I would have loved to have the web during grade school. My parents had a grade school education, and as much as they wanted to help me with homework, they simply couldn't. However, I always managed to find someone to help or a good book to provide the answer.

The thing is the web won't give us every answer and sometimes it only comes up with answers it thinks might work. The example I'm leading to here is maps. ABC News has an interesting story on this as well. Just because your phone has GPS doesn't mean it can always tell you the shortest or most accurate way to get someplace. And what happens when you have no 3G and no map? I guess you get lost. Like this: