Well, recently my family and I decided to head up to a great French château, Fontainebleau.  Now, to be honest I was not really interested, but I decided I would give it a shot, as several chateaus have really intrigued me, and most (if not all) are very beautiful buildings, that are at least worth seeing once.

So, we arrived at Fontainebleau after a somewhat lengthy drive, getting lost several times along the way, and finally walked onto the grounds.  Now, the grounds of Fontainebleau are quite amazing, large open lawns, beautiful plants, and an overall air of peace and tranquility.  After a bit of wandering, we got to the entrance of the museum section.  (well, more of a walk through of the château)

After waiting for a while, my mother returned with the tickets (kids are free), and we were ready to begin.  Except for one thing, the audioguides.  Now, when I was younger, I loved the novelty of the audioguides.  You could listen to what people with soothing voices said about the site you visited.  But as I have gotten older, I despise the things, for several reasons.  One, I am not an audio learner, I would much rather read something telling me about the significance of something, that listen to someone tell me about it.  Two, I think it shows how lazy people are today.  Why should I bother to read something, pfft, I would rather listen.  And three, you usually never get the whole story from one of them, unless you are alone (I’ll explain later).

So, my first point is somewhat self-explanatory, I would rather read than listen.  No problem, right?  Well, nope.  With audioguides becoming more and more popular (I assume) Fontainebleau only had very small signs, with minimal information, sometimes none at all.  So, without listening to the audioguide, I could only get the bare minimum of information.  Now, I know this is not something that happens everywhere, but I think that if current trends continue, we could see more and more museums becoming like this, and switching to a more audio focus rather than a visual one. 

The second point is on that I think is very important.  As technology becomes able to do more and more for us, we rely on it too much, and we see things like obesity rising.  And who knows what tomorrow holds in store for us, could we have machines do everything for us?  This is going to be a very important choice humans will have to make sometime soon, do we want machines to do everything? (I mean somewhat near future, as in next several hundred years).

My third point is somewhat different than the others.  However, if you have ever been to a museum with a decent sized group of people (4-5 and up), and gotten the audioguide, you will know what I am talking about.  In that group (more so if you have younger children with you) there will be a group of people who just listen to the start of every bit of audio, then move on to the next room.  Then you have the people who listen to every single word of the guide, and as a result fall way behind the others.  You will then be pressured into speeding up and not get all the information you want.  I am one of the second type of people, and it frustrates me a lot when my family just skims through the audio, rather than listening the entire thing. 

So, I suppose my point is a somewhat simple one, but I truly believe that as a society, we are becoming too lazy. Eventually we will get to a point where machines/computers will be able to do anything for us, and at that point, I hope we choose to keep some things the same.