Choosing To Be Blindfolded

Technology has bad effects we people choose to ignore. Birkerts does not want people to stop using technology. He just wants people to realize that humans made technology for certain purposes, technology did not make people. But the real question is how much will it change people's future after they know realize how much technology is affecting them. Will people try to change this or will they keep on going like nothing happened?

"When everything is happening everywhere, it gets harder to care about anything."(Birkerts, 73)  This is a reference to the bad effects of technology. For example, downloading music and movies is illegal because they are copyrighted items, but now it happens so much that no one cares that they are violating laws. This is how much human nature has changed over the years.  People know what is right and wrong but they are choosing to be blindfolded. Before, we used to work hard to do something, but now with technology, we have decreased our work time, but also decreased quality. When using a search engine on the Internet, we only look for specific facts and overlook other information that we do not know but could be useful. We know we can get more and better information using a reference book, but we still use Internet because it has less work to input. We choose the easy way out by not aiming for an A, but hoping for a B.
One of my favorite quotes is "in time-- I don't know how long it will take- -it will feel as strange (and exhilarating) for a person to stand momentarily free of it as it feels now for a city dweller to look up at night and see a sky full of stars," (Birkerts, 224). I like this because I can relate to both sides. A starry sky is always there but a city dwellers cannot see it because he does not pay close attention to it. In the same way, technology will become so big a part of our life that we will not notice. We will see technology with actually seeing it  and its effects. It will become an involuntary gesture to use technology. I was once a "city dweller" who could not see the stars, but knew they existed. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew what was going on and could see the changes but I never bothered to pay attention to it.  Birkerts thinks that is where we are headed as we already value things like Internet, cell phones, etc. above everything. People commonly say "I cannot live without my cellphone." That hints that Birkerts is right in his assumption of the future.This book does not tell kids to stop using technology but to see the changes technology is making and to keep old things like books around. People might argue that technology has positive effects, but no one can deny the negative effects of it also.