You also challenge my suggestion that reliance on technology may actually be getting people lost. I cited evidence showing this may be the case.

In your send-off sentence advising people to “[f]orget backward-looking articles such as this and focus on” how to use modern technology, you assume that technological inventions necessarily amount to advancements. But societies have become arguably poorer and less sophisticated in many ways due to technology. Cars isolate us from others and pollute our air. Cell phones divert us from our kids, our friends, our pets and our world. Television and industrial junk foods have made us fatter than ever. Are you familiar with the problems associated with e-waste? The overall achievements of the industrial revolution may prove, in fact, to be the downfall of the planet.

You deride Luddites in your opening sentence, but they certainly may bear practical knowledge, strength and skills–and learning these skills can challenge us to engage our brains and temporarily log off of the Internet. You’re right: My article is definitely taking a look backward.

The simple truth is that clocks have reduced our natural sense of time, electronic calculators have reduced our ability to calculate “by heart”, and smartphones reduce the necessity to remember things and to find our way.

But the truth is also that you can now use your thus freed brain cells to do something else and something better with them. This widening of your abilities is one aspect of technology use that this kind of articles regularly forgets to mention.

What the article also does not say is that smartphones and other navigation devices are a godsend when things are getting rough, like when you are lost or when you are driving at night in rain or snow and have to get off the freeway because it is blocked. These articles like to tell you the story of somebody getting lost because of a GPS, but they don’t tell you how many people (a) got saved by their smartphones after getting lost or (b) can now do things with the help of a GPS that they could not do without.

A paper map is useless in such a situation because, contrary to what the article says, it does not show you where you are. But the GPS does. And it leads you home, provided you know how to use it properly.

I usually switch on the smartphone navigation during the rush hour to and from work, not because I don’t know all the possible routes, but because Google Nav (or your favorite online navigation system) knows the current traffic situation precisely and steers me away from the traffic jams and onto the quickest way.

Forget backward-looking articles such as this and focus on the best ways to use modern technology. And yes, I still have a paper map with me and know how to use it, but only as a fallback.

He told me he was headed to Seattle, then on to Fairbanks, his home. His GPS said Seattle was only 600 miles further, so he felt he could make it in one day. I took out my Rand McNally atlas and showed him, on the map, that Seattle was a good bit more than a one day’s drive from Austin, Minnesota, and he’d need to be on another interstate to get there. Boy, was he surprised! How could the GPS be wrong? So in addition to food and gas and some company, I gave him the atlas. Four days later, he called to let me know he was safe in Seattle, and thanked for the map — “I don’t know what I would have done without it.”

A half-hour later, however, I realized we were hopelessly lost, so I signaled my daughter to pull to the side of the road so we could plot a course for home. I pulled out my trusted, highly detailed road map, and my daughter laughed. She said she had GPS, so we could follow her home.

I was skeptical, though, and decided to stick with my map. When we hit the next crossroads, we went in separate ways. We beat her home by 15 minutes.

I would say this is one of my #1 concerns about current social trends these days, but it isn’t. It is about #341 of my concerns about current social trends these days.

Cheers,

Michael