In one of my recent blogs, I said, “I could google it, but I would rather ponder over it.” And that got me thinking about the way things are going. As a writer, artist, musician, poet, and deep thinker, I love to mull things over, to seek deeper or personal meanings. Pondering, musing, and contemplating gets us dreaming and creating. Will all that natural contemplation be lost to the next few generations as they learn to utilize the machines? Will they still be taught to think for themselves? To be able to do things without the machines?
Google is an amazing tool. We have any and all information at our fingertips or voice commands. Has everyone thrown out their encyclopedias, synopses, and dictionaries? Do young people know what an encyclopedia is? Are they still being taught how to search for information from books?
We are on the cusp of the end of yet another year. We have seen tremendous changes to our way of life in the past fifty years. Our personal life and our work life. Cell phones are our new appendage. They go everywhere – and can work almost anywhere. Almost everyone has access to their own cell phone…and computers, iPads, Kindles, gaming equipment, and so much more. Computer graphics continue to blow us away with amazing, inconceivable beauty – and horror. Computer programing is revolutionizing the way we do things. It makes everything work faster and easier for us, which is enabling many of us to work from home, but that is also slowly taking over many jobs. We saw it coming, but there was no stopping it. The computer and internet world is a monster that is sometimes used for good and sometimes used for evil. It aids, and it destroys. We love it and we hate it.
So, I question, I mull over, the human side of it all. When designers, architects and artists can create just the right sketch or full drawing by clicking a mouse a half a dozen times, saving scads of time, what will happen if – or when – the grid fails? Will our future generations know how to draw the plans for a house, paint a beautiful sunset, see the potential of a dead space without filling it first with a computer program prompt? Will they understand the dimensions that will be needed for rooms, closets, porches…?
Will people get so used to letting machine-generated information be their guide and livelihood that we lose our need to discover on our own? Or our need for wisdom? Will we lose true art? True, base creativity? The ability to troubleshoot? To take a pencil and a piece of paper and start with nothing? Will we lose our poets? These are questions that are, indeed, worth deep contemplation. I am hoping the pure human side of us wins out and we don't lose our inate need to create and dream...and our poets remain.
Drawings by: Carol Briske (MLK), David, Colleen, Landon, and Elijah Ferguson
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