Could technology be weakening the ability of our minds to learn?
Movies like Inception are setting the box-office cash-registers ringing for their portrayal of how technology can be used to invade our dreams. At the same time, there is a real-world debate on how the constant presence of technology is weakening the ability of our minds to learn. The American technology expert and author, Nicholas Carr recently mentioned that Google may be responsible for us “losing our ability to engage in more attentive ways of thinking.” This isn’t the first time that Carr has raised this question, whose 2004 book, Does IT Matter?, raised a furore among top executives from HP, Microsoft and others. In 2008, he wrote an article titled – Is Google Making Us Stoopid? – where he highlighted that the Internet may have adverse effects on our minds’ capacity for concentration. In the same vein was his recent interview, where he proposed that Google should make its products tougher to use in order to give our brains some exercise. His stand contradicts Google’s philosophy, which is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’
Carr’s discontent is not with Google alone; he has expressed his worry about the ease with which we have information available. Prolonged and unchecked Internet usage could cause Attention Deficit Disorder, Internet addiction, or even social isolation. We are also getting used to reading information in snippets from various sites instead of spending time on a single web page. Prof. Maryanne Wolf at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, has expressed her concern over the effect technology could have on the reading abilities of the coming generation. “The problem of a less potentiated reading brain becomes urgent in the discussion about technology. We human beings are not just the product of what we read, but how we read. The essential question is: how well will we preserve the critical capacities of the present expert reading brain as we move to the digital reading brain of the next generation?” said Wolf.
Movies like Inception are setting the box-office cash-registers ringing for their portrayal of how technology can be used to invade our dreams. At the same time, there is a real-world debate on how the constant presence of technology is weakening the ability of our minds to learn. The American technology expert and author, Nicholas Carr recently mentioned that Google may be responsible for us “losing our ability to engage in more attentive ways of thinking.” This isn’t the first time that Carr has raised this question, whose 2004 book, Does IT Matter?, raised a furore among top executives from HP, Microsoft and others. In 2008, he wrote an article titled – Is Google Making Us Stoopid? – where he highlighted that the Internet may have adverse effects on our minds’ capacity for concentration. In the same vein was his recent interview, where he proposed that Google should make its products tougher to use in order to give our brains some exercise. His stand contradicts Google’s philosophy, which is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’
Carr’s discontent is not with Google alone; he has expressed his worry about the ease with which we have information available. Prolonged and unchecked Internet usage could cause Attention Deficit Disorder, Internet addiction, or even social isolation. We are also getting used to reading information in snippets from various sites instead of spending time on a single web page. Prof. Maryanne Wolf at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, has expressed her concern over the effect technology could have on the reading abilities of the coming generation. “The problem of a less potentiated reading brain becomes urgent in the discussion about technology. We human beings are not just the product of what we read, but how we read. The essential question is: how well will we preserve the critical capacities of the present expert reading brain as we move to the digital reading brain of the next generation?” said Wolf.
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).
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