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Google warns us: "Turn off your computer"

Feb
26

A day after the President brought the University of Notre Dame together on his “tiny island of common ground”, as Eric Johnson so well put it, Google CEO Eric Schmidt cautioned graduating seniors at the University of Pennsylvania to step away from their PC’s and try a little human TLC.Well, it’s obvious that Mr. Schmidt doesn’t want this generation to step away from the computer entirely. (He’s storing the very article you’re reading right now, so we agree with him on that!) He may have just been telling the Ivy Leaguers, “Hey nerds… go outside!” But the caution he offers is well-noted.Graduates who raise a family starting today will be faced with rearing a generation that grows up with their lives plastered on Facebook.Gone are the days when Mom would ring the dinner bell to summon you home from the playground for dinner. Now all she has to do is buzz your “iCarly” ring tone while you’re wirelessly-linking Nintendo DS’s with your friends.Mr. Schmidt wants people to be reminded of why we would ever have developed all this “social” technology in the first place: to connect with one another. But as a good friend tells me all the time, “I’m so wired, I’m disconnected.”I expect that video chatting via cell phone is not far off from being the norm. (That’ll introduce a whole new slew of driver distraction problems by the way.) Video conferencing is already well-established via computer, with many more developments sure to come there as well.The problem, as I see it, is that we substitute those technological opportunities all too often for a “real” face-to-face. I don’t just want to be able to see your face, I also want to be able to smack it around.So take Mr. Schmidt’s caution to heart. “All things in moderation”, sounds about right. Well, except for real human interaction. We should probably get addicted to that again.

Article orginally published at http://www.collegepulse.net/2009/05/google-warns-us-turn-off-your-computer.htmlCopyright 2009 – The College Pulse Network – CollegePulse.net
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