Richmond - The Editor, Re: "Smartphones can dumb down kids," Letters, Dec. 18.Thank you Anna Toth and Mr. Cheung for expressing your ideas on Smartphone usage, and how it dumbs down kids. I could not agree more.
Richmond - The Editor, Re: "Smartphones can dumb down kids," Letters, Dec. 18.Thank you Anna Toth and Mr. Cheung for expressing your ideas on Smartphone usage, and how it dumbs down kids. I could not agree more.Today, we live in a society where we are surrounded by technology. But, no one has ever wondered, "Are those technologies really necessary?" Well, almost no one, except for my Social Studies teacher. She, too, is an ardent supporter of anti-Smartphone.Almost every kid in the hallways of any high school or university wanders around with a phone.About 10 years ago, people would have no problem calculating the total amount of a restaurant bill in their heads. Today, we see people whipping out their cellphones and accessing an app specially designed for calculating tips.Of course, I agree we all need a phone for socializing. But, do we really need a cellphone that has a fingerprint scanner, and some facial recognition? Personally speaking, I think we would be much smarter if all of us had simple Nokia bricks.In Social Studies 11, we learned that Canada, who had become over-dependent on the U.S., fell into a depression when the U.S. economy collapsed. Is it not happening to us again today? We, the humans, are being over-reliant on our cellphones and technology that we would all look like cavemen and idiots if the power went off or the world suddenly had a huge blackout.Look at how smart we are. Seldom today do you find a piece of technology that you could talk to everyday without running out of batteries.Humans are much more amazing than technologies, and we will always be smarter than the technologies we create, only if we stop relying on them.I am not saying all technology is bad, surely, projectors and pacemakers have made our life much more convenient. But, when push comes to shove, and when use becomes abuse, we are the ones being abused by the technology.The more we rely on the technology, the more we dumb down, as Mr. Cheung would say.The problem today is that we have been inundating ourselves with different types of technology that in the end, we will either die from dumbness, or from cellphone radiation.David ZouRichmond
