Techvolution

At the beginning of the semester I defined technology as, "Anything not found in nature – be it made by man, animal, alien, machine or whatever – that changes lives in some way." I stand by that definition, but it's evolving.

That blog focused on technology’s potential to change education. While I remain interested in hands-on gadgetry, I’ve come to see that technology is everything. There is little in life that remains perfectly natural.

Driving to school on a Monday morning I made the usual Starbucks stop. I pulled in, checked the GPS unit to see how many miles I had left between that stop and school (apparently I have a subconscious hope the number will change one day), grabbed my PDA phone and jumped out of the car. Halfway to the building, I remembered I didn’t lock the doors, so I pushed the button on my key without missing a step.

After startling a few blackbirds out of their oily watering puddle, I went inside to find about half a dozen stereotypical middle-aged workmen. All were grungy and good-natured, several had mullets and all had southern accents. These were the Bubbas and Juniors of my lower middle class suburb. As I scrolled through my to-do list in my phone, they guys joked with one of the baristas about tipping. One of them said, with what had to be the thickest drawl in Texas, “Don’t buy Lucent.”

How the heck would some cattle rancher/construction worker type know what to or not to buy in the stock market? Well, technology. No longer are stocks the high-dollar equivalent to a magic eight ball for people off Wall Street. Now, we check the newspaper, listen to the radio or log into our favorite day-trading Web sites. Thanks to technology, these guys are not held to stereotypes by their careers.

In the few miles between my house and Starbucks, I encountered a car, GPS, Wi-fi, oil, glass, red-light cameras, free enterprise, mass-production coffee and tea, and stock trading. And that was before I actually started my day.

Once at school, I looked up a student who had passed away over the weekend. Facebook gave his friends and classmates the chance to grieve openly on this wall. The social networking program even allowed him to make new friends after he had passed.

Thanks to the cold weather, I was layered with man-made fibers and a coat. I was safe from fire with the flame retardant chemicals required in each layer. The heat was on, so layers started to peel away fairly quickly. I considered getting a flu shot, but remembered I hate needles more than missing classes. I’ll let my natural defenses take care of that one.

I wrote the stories to consider that day on the dry-erase board and erased those that had come in. I studied books printed with machinery and bound by glue instead of thread. I printed papers on a laser printer after running them through the spell check program a final time.

By lunchtime, I walked (there’s some nature) to the deli on campus and bought lunch – probably a grilled cheese sandwich and Dr. Pepper - with my credit card, which the cashier swiped through her machine. Given the preservatives in soda, cheese, bread and even butter, I won’t count anything I consumed that day as natural. Technology improves the shelf life of everything I eat late in a semester.

I studied with some fellow students – all on our laptops – and researched a paper before walking (there’s that nature again) back to my car and heading home, where I used resin-heavy fatwood to ignite a fire (with real wood, as far as I know) in which I threw chemically treated pine cones to make the flames blue and green.

In a single day, I encountered at least a dozen technological uses that I regularly take for granted. Yes, technology is anything not found in nature that changes our lives. But it’s evolving. For me, technology IS my life. The little bits of nature I encounter stand out in the sea of technological existence.

After a semester discussing technology in our world, I realize that between preservatives, flame-retardant fibers, navigation systems and wireless information at my fingertips, I’ve reached a point that to function in nature would change my life more than using technology does. I now realize that I’ve evolved to the point that technology is the rule, nature the exception.