Internet dumbing-down hysteria compared against previous waves of anti-tech backlash
Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it's the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they're interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn't, they don't buy into it.Is the Internet melting our brains?I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.
We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."
the latest
latest episodes
Ironically the book the author is talking about is not available digitally.
Perhaps the internet doesn't make us stupid, it just more efficiently demonstrates to us how stupid we've been all along.
only to the clever, the stupid think it makes us look clever
Plato's critique of writing? No, that was Socrate's critique of writing, which Plato (his student, who didn't agree with him on many points) wrote down.
I believe it has melted by brain, and made it tingly.
The writer illustrates McLuhan's rear view mirror syndrome
Steve
This makes me think of this recent article claiming that e-books disinsoulify authors:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6202501/Ebooks-will-make-authors-soulless-just-like-their-product.html
I'm sure this tells a lot about a deep idea concerning the nature of reality and how it is structured by the outpouring of it's own contents but I just can't say.
I'm not saying I actually believe this, but just as a discussion point, what if some of those naysayers were right?
After all, it would be hard to argue that TV, for instance, has been an unalloyed good -- in fact, I think one could argue that its net effect has been negative, and that that negative effect has multiplied as the number of channels available have.
As I say, I'm not saying that I necessarily believe this, but I think it's at least worth discussing. I'm very, very strongly in support of tech progress,, but it seems self-evident that every technological advance solves some problems, and introduces some new ones. Scoffing at worries about those problems is as silly as saying that nothing should ever change because of the problems that changes introduce. That's true whether those concerns are current, or a hundred or a thousand years old.
If I recall correctly, Plato wrote it down, but he was attributing the critique of writing to Socrates, so Plato wasn't being a hypocrite.
The only possible improvement to the internet will be the Exernet.
When I went online fifteen years ago my mental life improved and my productivity quadrupled. It's BETTER than sliced bread.
I hate sliced bread.
New communications devices free up the clutter in our minds allowing us to focus on more important thoughts. Perfect example is all the telephone numbers we remembered in the past. Now they're simply on the screen for us to scroll down to.
I don't think Morse was entirely wrong. He was talking about business - since businesses were the main customers of the telegraph. Lots of the most important business traffic did stay on the telegraph, probably up until fax machines became common.
Thoreau also lauded the telegraph, called its wires humming in the Walden woods an aeolian harp evoking the energies of the universe. From his diary of 1851:
I'd wished the author had researched his arguments a bit more, cherrypicked (or missed) less inconvenient data that went against his thesis: I found this entry on the Internet, armed with little more than a suspicion, having read the passage a decade-and-a-half ago. Memory, win; tech, win: author, fail.
@6
yeah, but there's a clear difference between technologies that enable two way communication compared to a single channel as with television.
@12. yeah. maybe the internet has dumbed down academia a bit,
>On the other hand, I survey my students all the time about this, and there's confirming data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that, in fact, what people are using programs like Facebook and e-mail and chats for is to reinforce friendships and to maintain friendships across distance.
like, somebody pays the author dollars to write this? otoh, there's always a market for dreary why-oh-why because ultimately, they're really feel-good articles for their readership (like, salon or the daily telegraph), so can't blame the author for taking those dollars.
Damn all you kids and your cell phones and your internet and your Blu-ray movie players and your Sony Playstation 3s and your Facebook profiles and your Twitter and your internet memes and your webcomics and your weblogs and your voice-over-ip and your lolcats and your Rickrolling and your Wikipedia and your iPhones and your mp3 players and your search engines and your eBay and your online dating services and your World of Warcraft and your Kindle and your digital rights management and your torrents and your porn websites and your imageboards and your Google maps and your...
As someone who's gone to Luddism (Ludditism? whatever) and back, this was a great read. I came full circle on much the same conclusion: that 'technology' is often conveniently defined as anything invented after your birth.
I don't blame anyone suspicious of new technology: it brings out a lot of things we didn't know about ourselves. But that's just it: their concern is not with anything innate about the technology itself, but rather our response to it. Consciously or unconsciously, they fear the worst of human nature.
For better and for worse, I feel that technology is just that: a prism of human nature. With every advance, we discover a more detailed spectrum of ourselves, with hues we never knew existed. And better coffee.
Does it help to be a little fearful? Absolutely. Some inventions claim to 'save time' (whatever that means) or save labor, when they really only deny us from acquiring skill. And other inventions-- I'm looking at you, atomic bomb-- seem to gleam evil from just about any angle.
But too much fear is tantamount to pessimism-- an tacit refusal to consider how it might bring out the best in human nature. And as Baron points out, history is dotted with people making these myopic canary cries.
I agree. It's time to not only look forward but up as well.
I haven't read the book- but this guy's interview is not very convincing. He basically asks his students what they think about facebook and whether they think their writing suffers because of emoticons? As if they're going to say "yes, it does, actually!"
I know the old fart stereotype of "back in my day" exists for a reason, but that doesn't discount any genuine criticism of society's mad rush towards faster and cheaper. Not fear, but criticism. I can see the quality of people's grammar and spelling decreasing everywhere I look, not to mention the completely disjointed, illogical flow of people's emails, letters, and essays. The syntax is terrible, and they don't realize just how poorly they've communicated whatever it is they intended. I even do it myself sometimes, when I'm not paying attention; copying is what we do best, and we are easily influenced by all that is around us, especially when we're not paying attention.
The positive aspects of the internet are obvious, and no one's discounting them. But let's not ignore the several negatives which are already apparent in our social fabric. I'm sure our memories are much shitter than they were in the days of the classic Greeks, and that we've lost many skills over the centuries that humans possessed beforehand. Why deny it?
Sounds like an intelligent take on this issue, and I always love to see an academic press book positioned in the mainstream market.
I'd say the internet has had a hugely net positive effect on me. I spend very little time wondering about or arguing about reference facts, since it's so easy to find most information within seconds on the internet. That probably means I carry around fewer facts in my brain, but unless the internet goes away any time soon, I'm not really worried about that. (A similar phenomenon happened with phone numbers and my brain. Before cell phones, I had dozens of numbers memorized. Now, with my portable contact list, I have to struggle to remember my own land line. Does this mean my brain is stupider? No, it just means I've outsourced some of the boring information storage to my cyborg brain extension, my cell phone.)
As for the long-term effect of the internet on human intelligence, I suspect this will have more to do with how the internet is regulated, corporatized, democratized, etc, than the technology per se. Printing presses and book technology made us smarter, but that what are books without public libraries? What are printing presses without cheaply available free press newspapers?
@19:
You make a severe mistake in your statement.
It is not the quality people's writing in general that is deteriorating, it is the writing of the people that you are reading today that is worse than that of the people whose writing you are reading today.
Alas, they aren't the same people.
10 years ago you could not possibly have read my writing. Because I wasn't on the Internet. Period.
Outside the Internet, you only get to see the writing of a very select group of people. Many people chose not to write anything at all that amounted to more than the occasional letter. And almost none of them had *any* of what they wrote published. They wrote for themselves, their colleagues, their family and friends - but nothing for *you* to read.
It is not the quality of writing in general that is getting worse, it is just the average of *publicly available* writing that is getting worse while its amount is exploding, because more and more people's whose writing is less than optimal is publicly available.
> It is not the quality people's writing in general that is deteriorating, it is the writing of the people that you are reading today that is worse than that of the people whose writing you are reading today.
See, I'm part of the problem. :)
It is not the quality people's writing in general that is deteriorating, it is the writing of the people that you are reading today that is worse than that of the people whose writing you were used to reading. -> And those are not the same people.
Oh, and edit buttons are part of the solution. ;)
Perhaps, but I'm referring mostly to people I work with- not text messages or message board comments, but in professional settings which have existed long before the internet. Office memos, letters to clients, employees, each other... and take a look at advertising copy. Spelling and grammatical errors on TV AND PRINT ADS, which was once inexcusable, are now common. I see it all the time- it blows my mind that these errors don't get caught by editors, yet there it is. People merely 10 years younger than me exhibit their ADD personas through scattered letters, in professional settings, that reveal exactly how their minds are working. I'm not referring to merely a new generational style that contrasts the old, but a basic inability to grasp logical construct when communicating.
My mother, for example, is not particularly well educated, never went to a 4-year college, etc. etc. She's not even a native English speaker, and yet she still has a basic skill set in the composition department that is lacking in the 2009 version of what my mom would be at age 21. I know what's important changes as society changes, but a society that lacks the capacity for in-depth analysis and deconstruction requiring a mind that doesn't get distracted every 10 seconds is a society that's fucked, basically. There have always been dumb, average people- I get that. But "Idiocracy" is, unfortunately, all too real these days...
@23. ha yeah. there's an upside, by being able to do basic mental arithmetic you can seem a calculating prodigy in the average checkout line.
Oh, and edit buttons are part of the solution.
That would deprive everyone of the joy of making fun of other people's mistakes.
by being able to do basic mental arithmetic you can seem a calculating prodigy in the average checkout line.
I went to pay for a purchase and handed the young gentleman a twenty. He punched that in so that the cash register would calculate the change, before I could hand him a quarter as well. At that point he was confronted with having to subtract $18.21 from $20.25. He started crying. I'm not making this up. I think that's about when I started using plastic to pay for everything.
My problem is with all these kids who know less about technology and how to use it than I do. I'm 44--I've been able to program since junior high, had my first email account in 1989, and am pretty savvy (and excited!) about every new piece of tech that comes my way. I can find pretty much everything I look for on the web. Etc. But the kids I teach only know how to use their phones and twitter. They're incredibly ignorant of the technology around them and don't take advantage of it. They can't even do a basic google search. That frightens me.
@Antinous 26: He started crying? I've confounded clerks in the same way, but never to the point of tears.
I must add, this speaks well of your character. This incident happened, and you responded by switching to paying for everything with plastic. If this incident happened to me, I'd be sorely tempted thereafter to make all my purchases with cash, and always hand the clerk an extra bit of change after the drawer popped open. I probably wouldn't do it, but I'd be sorely tempted.
(Although I guess your comment at 25 kind of balances this out)
@23 Das Mensen -
When your mom was 21, much business communication was (or had until recently been) mediated through secretaries who took stream-of-consciousness dictation and munged the result into something grammatical and orderly.
The dumbing down of corporate communications is easily attributable to the rise of people doing their own typing and printing technology becoming cheap enough not to have its own gatekeepers in a typical organization.
The internet is such an amazing tool it is hard for me to see how it can be other than a net positive in the long run.
There are definitely problems, but the ability to find information about almost anything nearly instantaneously really swamps the downside, at least for me. Granted, a person needs to vet the accuracy of information found as there are a lot of nutburgers with ideas online, but healthy scepticism is always a good thing, online or off.
As for the quality of writing...just as a wild guess I'd say that many of the people who are forced by the nature of the medium to write online would have been purely oral communicators 25 years ago. If we were somehow able to measure writing skills today and 25 years ago including this group of "new writers" and that same social set that didn't write at all back then, then the average writing skill would have to be higher today I would think, simply because doing something almost always makes a person better at it. I could be wrong, though.
Dumbing down?
Or smartening up?
Perhaps like water people find their own level.
brought to you by today's internet (and the ESO): )
http://www.eso.org/gallery/v/Videos/Galaxies/vid-32a-09_FLASH.flv.html
I've noticed that letters of the sort that tend to show up on history television-- such as those written by soldiers in the Civil War, or western pioneers-- tend to be much more eloquent and grammatically correct than most Americans are capable of writing today. But I don't think the Internet is entirely responsible for that. Probably a smaller percentage of people could write at all, back then. Perhaps those letters which did survive were protected because of their quality and fragility. Now, on the other hand, illiteracy is no impediment to ubiquitous, cheap, permanent distribution.
On the other hand, I know I'm not writing this particularly well because I'm currently having two conversations and watching Star Wars. Another data point!
In some respects the internet is melting our brains, due to the informal speech often used. However, I would argue that it has opened up many more fields of communication, means of communication, and avenues to express one's thoughts. As a result, the internet definitely has some positive impacts upon communication.
>In some respects the internet is melting our brains, due to the informal speech often used.
?why is informal speech melting your brain?
This board is testimony to why the internet is great. The other thing which many have touched on, but not clearly enough is that the internet can be used to check everything.
On the net you can find the answer to most any question. You can correct your pronunciation or you can quickly and easily check your spelling.
You can learn how to effectively build, degisn, construct and produce anything from a business card catapult to cocaine (and that's just on BB!)
You can save tons of time, money & legwork by learning from the mistakes of others.
While the net might not make us smarter, it can certainly help us look smarter and work/play smarter. For most of us appearance is enough to get by - if we look productive, our boss will think we are productive - even if its just the same ol' google analytics screen that we alt-tab up every time he/she walks by :)
Since it seems to me that intelligence in a person is there or not, I can't see how the internet could make someone dumber or smarter.
I know people who never use the internet at all, but they are very wise and have a lot of common sense. These people I would consult about important topics. I know other people who are on the internet and social sites a lot that I would never ask anything important of.
For my own knowledge,I feel like I know a lot more about the world because of the internet. I get a bigger picture than I could get if the internet didn't exist. But I'm not sure all the facts make me actually smarter. Just better informed.