“Something else was happening when these commercially available GPS-enabled gadgets started hitting the larger population—something more fundamental. Instead of lifting our heads, looking around, and thinking for ourselves, some of us no longer saw the world as human beings have for thousands of years and simply accepted whatever our gadgets showed us,” writes Robert Vamosi in his new book “When Gadgets Betray Us: The Dark Side of our Infatuation with New Technologies.”
In turn, Nick is one of those guys who doesn’t like maps or taking travel directions; however, his wife Candy got Nick a GPS navigation device for their van before taking this trip to the central Oregon coast from their home in central Washington. In turn, the fastidious and fact-checking Candy says she “loves GPS,” but Nick is not so keen, stating “I hate to rely on a machine during my summer vacation. I want to get away from that stuff, and now I’m listening to this voice tell me where to go when maybe I want to explore that road without some voice telling me I’m going the wrong way.”
At the same time, wife Candy and their two kids say they literally broke in huge laughs when Nick “got crazy with this GPS.” Vamosi writes that frustration with technology is “common now days,” as more users of technology fight the urge to use their own brains over some tech gadget.
GPS helps drivers but also puts them in a fuzzy haze of self-doubt
With a helpless wave of his hands, Nick pulls into this central Oregon camp site both dazed and confused. He’s experiencing what many summer drivers to the coast – where such locations as camp sites are off the main highway and sometimes have signs that are hidden – claim is GPS hangover.
Marty, a local traveler, notes that he would never use GPS because “I don’t doubt my skills as a driver.”
He then breathed an exasperated sigh, and notes how “my old man would think people are crazy to trust this GPS because he prided himself in reading and following maps. I guess both my father and I take pride in our map reading.”
For those not in tune with the Global Positioning System or GPS, it’s a space-based device that’s linked to the “Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)” that – according to directions on one GPS device – “provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth.”
In turn, a U.S. government website states that GPS satellites are “maintained by the government” and is “freely accessible by anyone with a GPS receiver with some technical limitations which are only removed for military users.”
GPS is another technology that’s taken hold with over 900 million users
According to Vamosi’s investigation in his book “When Gadgets Betray Us,” “different vendors have sold millions of GPS enabled gadgets for use in private airplanes, cars and boast since the mid-1990s. ABI Research predicts that over 900 million people will use GPS navigation devices in both dashboard gadgets and via mobile phone, by 2013.”
“Our need to know where we are is primal, and mobile gadgets give us that means in a way never before possible in human history. For many of us, myself included, it is an understatement to say that people today can’t live without their technology. It’s addictive. But in order to reach the masses, technology vendors have taken shortcuts. Software wizards whisk us through otherwise complex configuration settings, interfaces today have fewer and fewer options for advanced settings, and consumer goods are produced to be magic boxes whose internal components don’t involve the end user. Along the way, we’ve introduced some unintended consequences. What if our dashboard GPS gadgets deliberately misled us? GPS gadgets in our cars don’t just provide navigation; they also warn us of upcoming road closures or accidents. What if they lied?” writes Vamosi.
In turn, Nick thinks that his camping vacation with family will help him distress after a busy year working in the business world.
“I don’t want to return home and have to take a vacation from my vacation. I’ve told Cindy this, and that’s why we’re here on the coast camping. There’s no cell phone service, and the kids don’t have their laptops or video games along. It’s just us, and the GPS,” he jokes.
