Technology and We

With the advent and proliferation of the Internet, there has been much debate over its effects on intelligence. Does having unlimited instantaneous information make us more informed? Or is it a crutch that allows us to go through life without actually knowing anything? We all know the advantages of computers and the Internet. However, some people have argued that the Internet is actually making us dumber. In his book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein argues that the Internet is actually shortening our attention spans. He argues that our generation, having grown up with much of this technology, is less apt to sit down and engage any lengthy text. He even makes the case that despite having more information available to us than any prior generation, we are less knowledgeable—calling us the dumbest generation

While it would be easy to dismiss Bauerlein—especially after his offensive title—as a Luddite technophobe, he does make some valid points. Much of new technology and social media force us to oversimplify. Only so much information can be crammed into a Facebook status or text message. Twitter explicitly limits a single post to 140 characters or less. There are many things in life that simply cannot be adequately explained, analyzed or discussed in these forms without eliminating much nuance and detail, often destroying the crux of its meaning. And this process has symptoms. Knowing that people are apt to skim the headline and then click on another link, news organizations have began to rely on increasingly sensationalist and simple stories in an attempt to hook readers. This has come at the expense of journalism.

For me, this is not some abstract concept. More and more, I see it in myself. I often click on a news story that looks interesting—only to read a couple lines and get distracted. Either I click on a link that takes me to another article that holds my attention briefly, or I open up a new tab in Google Chrome and do something else. If this sounds alien to you, perhaps something called the “F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content” will not. This technique essentially involves reading horizontally across the first few lines of an online text, then skipping down to the middle of an article and reading a few lines there and finally skimming vertically down the rest of the article until you hit the end. When I first realized this lazy habit had an actual name, I was mortified to realize how frequently I commit it.

And anyone who follows politics can plainly see the media adapting (or taking advantage of) our increasingly waning attention spans. Rather than relying on full speeches or debates, politics has been reduced to a series of out-of-context sound bites and video clips. This is not a positive development. This style of thinking does not parallel the technological progress that enables it. It is a marked intellectual regression—a much more primitive way of digesting information and understanding the world. This irony is not a function of our increasingly busy lives. As busy as we are or like to think we are, every generation before us has had the time to sit down and read entire books. And it is difficult to make a case against the values of these increasingly scarce tomes. If anything, this new technology that we have come to rely on should save us time, not cause us greater stresses or time burdens. However, to make sure we have enough time to read all our emails, we skim through news stories, watch short YouTube clips or do both simultaneously by relying on sites like the Huffington Post to get our news.

But while Bauerlein clearly has some salient points to make, he falls victim to his own thesis in the titling of his own book. He titles a book lambasting the waning attention spans of the digital generation and the oversimplification of complex ideas with an equally oversimplified title. Rather than clearly articulate his argument about the merits and pitfalls of many new technologies, he decries its users as the dumbest generation. And this argument clearly has no merit. When I saw Bauerlein speak at Cornell, he had trouble defining “dumbest”. And when I asked him to defend his title against his own thesis, he could only laugh and say it was a fair point. Study after study shows that generational IQ scores are continuing to trend up. Furthermore, our generation is much more effective at multitasking than any generation before us. And we are capable of using these new technologies to do incredible things that the generations before us would never be able to dream about.

While Bauerlein makes some interesting points, it seems like he is fighting against a tide that is already coming. Rather than bemoan the negative effects of these technologies, he would be better served to try to find ways to use these technologies to solve the problems he so deftly describes. There are always people who fear progress, especially technological progress. Usually, this fears stems from a lack of understanding. In ancient Greece, when people began to use paper to write things down more and more frequently, Plato feared that people would become incapable of remembering things as they came to rely on this new technology.

Technology can have both positive and negative effects. But it is essentially a tool. People can use it for good or bad. To develop or regress. The problem is that the average 15 to 24 year old now spends only ten minutes reading per day. But reading a full eBook instead of a paperback does not seem any better or worse to me.