Think back to the time you first powered up your iPhone. That exciting moment when the silver apple illuminated the black background and the fleeting look of trepidation on your face as you began your life with this new piece of technology. Now think about how this new addition has impacted your daily lifestyle. You probably find yourself reading books, playing games, or surfing the web at every free moment you have. It seems so harmless, but really the iPhone is too good to be true. You can access the internet everywhere, you can text people in a multitude of ways, and you can download billions of fun apps……but here’s the catch: 1. You neglect to evaluate your priorities, 2. You lose basic verbal communication skills and 3. You feel that it is the only way to relax when you have extra time on your hands. The way in which we perceive our internet of things is becoming significantly detrimental to our society, particularly our creativity. Like Einstein said ''[...] the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.'' There's more behind the negative aspect of the iPhone than the fact that it is major distractor. This device is allowing people to become lazy in academic settings. As mentioned before, it takes away the essential face-to-face contact that is critical for success in careers and school. Our generation is currently undergoing a creativity crisis. We think there's a correct answer to everything and that if we don't achieve it, we are failing.

On a beautiful Wednesday of spring break at Karen Dillard’s College Prep, I was reminded of a discussion I had in my gifted and talented class about a month prior. The test prep instructor asked, ”What are you supposed to analyze in the SAT reading passage?” The room was as quiet as a nervous test taker on the day of his first SAT. Nobody responded. ”Your brains have been trained to think that if nobody in the class responds, I will eventually just give you the correct answer right?” The teacher asked. ”Well, that doesn’t work with me.” Five minutes later someone finally answered the question (main idea and tone).

Afterwards, the teacher lectured us about the current creativity crisis that our society experiences. She said that we always think there is a precise answer to everything because we have been trained to perceive things as black and white. This reminded me of my class discussion about how we are hesitant at being creative because we don’t know whether or not our answer is the same as everyone else's. The progression of grades in school has definitely shown a decline in students' level of creativity. We use Google to answer homework questions and rely on iPhone apps to prepare us for school exams. Why is it that we can easily remember all 26 letters of the alphabet off the top of our heads, or all of the colors of the rainbow but we struggle to recall the distance formula while doing math? It is the lack of being exposed to imaginative environments. We all learned the alphabet, days of the week, and how to clean up by singing but we stopped signing after third grade. Why did we stop if it’s so helpful? Students may be performing better on tests now, but how much do you think they’ll remember 10 years from now when they have a patient in need of a heart transplant lying on the operating table? Simply reading an answer off of a bright screen is not going to allow our brains to encode that information forever. We are at risk of not performing well in the future because we are currently relying on the internet to give us answers. When we don't know something, we pull out our iPhones rather than pencils. The fact that over 500 million people own iPhones itself demonstrates how we all lack imagination. Why can't we find other ways to communicate?

Society has misunderstood the meaning of intelligence. To be considered intelligent, you don’t need to have the answer everyone is looking for, you need to have your own answer that is developed from your own thoughts and not something taken directly from a textbook or the internet. ''Intelligence is not knowledge, it's imagination.'' (Albert Einstein) There are copious inventors from our past who developed the things we take for granted today such as the calculator and Pythagorean theorem. These philosophers were not dependent on other people to create their ideas, they were all open-minded about seeking new ideas. They were intelligent. We currently lack creativity, and that is becoming potentially destructive to our society. Creativity is what essentially makes our world.