What is Progress?

Over the past couple of days, the question that my group (Jack, Charlie, and I) explored was, “What is progress?” Sure, it seems like a fairly obvious answer, but taking a closer look reveals that our technological advances have gone forward and brought other things backwards at the same time.  After reading a short article by Claire Porter, a Technology Editor, one of the most catching things I found was how technologies “forward progress” mainly connects to the efficiency.  The more we as humans can get done, the more we can progress individually and holistically.  But in her article, Five ways technology has failed us, she notes that we spend countless hours on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media.  Therefore, this extra time that we have, thanks to our technology, is being used for… well… more technology.  The quality and quantity of our human interaction is declining, although at the same time our interaction in general is exploding.  We can now communicate globally within a few seconds.  So, the question comes back around again, is this progress or are humans taking a step backwards?

                Another common argument is that technology already rules humans.  Some believe that we have contributed so much time and energy to the growth of technology that it now has past humans.  This statement isn’t even hard to understand because when you think about it, technology dominates us.  We drive cars nearly every day, we use our phones every day, majority of our homework we do on our computers… that’s right, every day.  It seems as if we don’t have the will power to put our technology away and enjoy the natural moments in our everyday life.  That goes for once in a life time events as well. As Porter states in her article, “If it isn’t Instagram it’s YouTube, if it isn’t Facebook it’s Twitter. We’re all blogging and posting and uploading, but how many of us are actually living?” In this day and age this question has become more prevalent than ever.  If I had to guess I’d say a majority of us spend much more times on our phones or computers than we do with nature, or even each other.  This is ultimately why it becomes difficult to define our technological progress as good so far.  Every step forward with phones and tablets seems to have a parallel step backwards, and in that sense there’s no progress at all.

                For our group project my title was, “The Middle Man.” To put it simply, Charlie was Pro Nature and Jack was Pro Technology and the goal for them was to persuade me into picking one over the other.  Throughout this process the ideas of progression and regression appear as Charlie and Jack try to counter each other and I try to figure out which side holds a better argument.  Overall I thought our idea was creative and we were able to explore the question quite well, but in order to make this project better, I think it would have helped to not do it during the time of finals.  Also if we had more time we might have been able to rap our lines to a beat which would make it more fun (and challenging).

Link to the article I foud: http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/five-ways-technology-has-failed-us/story-fnda1lbo-1226652142627