You’ve all heard tales of travelers who got stuck on unnavigable back roads or who ended up hundreds of miles off course after blindly following the directions on their global positioning systems. Their unquestioning reliance on technology negated the need to look at actual "ye olde mappes," or heed roadside warnings.

I yearned for a map at times during my college-visit road trip this past summer. (Unfortunately, the maps were stuck in the trunk in a very un-get-at-able spot.)

GPS navigation, like any other technology, is quite reliable, so it is easy for us to let our guard down — to let it do all the thinking for us — at the cost of using common sense. When I was on my trip, I could pinpoint my exact coordinates on earth at any given moment, but I wasn't always even entirely certain as to which state I was in.

In elementary school I knew my friends’ phone numbers, addresses, and even birthdays by heart. Apart from a few emergency numbers I no longer make an effort, and why should I? Everything I need is right on my phone. Memorizing this type of information is not really terribly important. The simple fact of memorization, however, is important (and any Uni student can tell you that there is plenty of that going on in our daily lives).

Luddites have decried new “tools” since the first workers were displaced by less labor-intensive technologies. Their tendency to expect the worst of every new technology should not be taken too seriously.

Claims such as “Google is making us stupid” are actually unfair and somewhat wrong. It’s inevitable that as consumers of media through the Internet our reading and thinking styles will not be the same as that of readers who lived in an isolated, slow, and less complicated world.

Technology and its concurrent ills are more a symptom of the world we live in than a cause of the “decline.” Of course we rapidly navigate through Web pages and “randomly” follow links from topic to topic, down the rabbit hole to subjects we would never have dreamt of reading about. Not to mention the addictiveness of the "Wikipedia Random Page Game."

This fast-paced style may decrease our capacity for concentration and contemplation, but given the vast amount of information available to us, we have to make choices about what we will skim and what we will read in its entirety. And those of us who are in school still read with focus and thoughtfulness (in addition to the quick and random Internet reading we love). What's more, in spite of all the superficial reading, we actually read more than previous generations.

Technology provides a tremendous benefit to curious people, because it puts almost infinite resources at their disposal. People who are too lazy to think will always end up doing something odd or stupid, but technology should not be blamed for it.