Is technology making us stupid or are we evolving?

Benjamin Barber

Speed
We share large volumes of information in a short amount of time
Community development
Our shared resources heighten the sense of group participation and ownership
Lateralness
We can communicate without an outside filter
Information
We can accumulate more information than ever before, fill in any gaps and make more connections

What we find with the move toward electronic media is an increase in __authority__, of the old audience. Through the four concepts this change is clearly presented.

What do we lose?
Experts begin to be dropped from the equation. Expert input on such a grand, high-speed scale simply takes too long, and there aren't nearly as many as needed. We, the old audience, need to take on the role of the expert.
By building our knowledge communities, void of experts, we begin to isolate ourselves within these sets of shared values. We strengthen our beliefs with the constant reinforcement of people with the same value set and begin to distrust information from opposing or external groups.

As we remove our filters, our older educational sources become devalued, marginalized and forgotten. We rely on our peers to transmit the knowledge sideways rather than our mentors transferring the knowledge down.

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Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr for The Atlantic June/July 2008.

I've discussed a little about the relationship between the human and his technology before, and perhaps I'll write a few posts on the natural cyborg component of Humanity.

The big concept in the reading is that we are losing part of our former culture, our former internal selves, as we continue to "outsource" our knowledge to our new technology. Is this good? Is it bad? What do we gain and lose?

Carr suggests that we're losing part of ourselves. By removing some of our ability to instantly recall facts and, therefore, to lose that knowledge as an informer on decisions or whatnot, is a clear loss of a faculty we've traditionally valued.

He calls on the example of Dave and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Specifically Carr utilizes the scene where Dave turns HAL off and HAL pleads with Dave to stay his hand; "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it.”

Carr associates the group feeling of our minds going with HAL's loss of self. For Carr, as we continue to use our technology for baser functions like storage and recall, we're losing part of the rich cognition that has defined the truly wise for hundreds of years.