There used to be a time where students would have the responsibility of learning

the material at hand by using their memories instead of depending on technology.

Now, calculators do all the hard math problems, spell check takes care of grammar,
and books are becoming fossils because who needs a book for research when you can
have use siri?
Kids used to be outside everyday playing sports or riding bikes, but now their eyes
are attached to
their video games,
while they are glued to the couch. Society has become so dependent on technology
that it wouldn`t know how to
function without it. So the question at hand is, is smarter technology making us
dumber?
It is possible to imagine that human nature, the human intellect, emotions and
feelings are completely
independent of our technologies; that we are essentially ahistorical beings with
one constant human nature
that has remained the same throughout history or even pre-history? Sometimes
evolutionary psychologists—those
who belief human nature was fixed on the Pleistocene Savannah—talk this way. I
think this is demonstrably wrong.

ancient cognitive technology, writing, was first invented perhaps five to six
thousand years ago around the fertile
crescent, probably developing from ‘counting tokens’ which it is thought were used
to keep track of agricultural
stores from as early as 7000 BC. Over the following millennia, the widespread (and
unforeseen) uses of writing
allowed some societies to develop not just entirely new forms of civilization and
culture, but new modes of cognition.
Writing is a cognitive technology if anything is. Writing (and reading) allowed us
to develop new and latent cognitive
abilities as—especially in Ancient Greece—thought moved from something that was of
the moment to something which could
be recorded and then brought to mind later. Thanks to writing, it became possible
to stabilize thoughts, more effectively
share thoughts, and especially criticize thoughts, both of ourselves and others.
Writing also fostered the ability to
produce and follow long chains of argument that could be criticized and expanded in
an iterative way. All this helped
draw out the timescale of thought from seconds and minutes, to week and years, to
eternity (it is possible to read
Plato’s dialogues today or even listen to it on your iPod, and thus commune with
the ancients). Writing allowed us to
ever more effectively redirect and reinvent our cognitive abilities. Many think a
particular inwardness of mind we take
for granted today and certain forms of imaginative projection were only really made
possible by writing.

So cognitive technologies—I have given two examples—have freed up tremendous

cognitive power by giving us the time
and the leisure to turn our minds away from the brute exigencies of life and toward
more liberating things as well as
tools to extend, restructure, and amplify certain modes of thinking. Writing
especially, by offering human beings new
facility to shape and mold our cognitive abilities, changed the nature of human
beings. We became in a novel sense,
self creators.

But this raises a question: if technology can do all this to change the way we
think for the better, might it not
similarly work for ill? According to Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: How
the Internet is Changing the Way We
Think, Read and Remember” (2010), the internet is such a technology. It may appear
as a technology to help us find
information we need and increasingly to connect with others but, it actually
functions as an engine of distraction,
geared up not to help us find what we need to know or maintain a train of thought,
but to distract, dissipate, and
frustrate us. Moreover, by encouraging distraction, it undermines our abilities to
deeply engage with knowledge and
encourages us to be shallower and less fully developed human beings. Let us look at
some of his examples.

Take hypertext: research appears to show that if you read the very same text off a
screen using hypertext rather
than from a book, you will read slower, more forgetfully, and you will have a
poorer sense of the overall meaning
of whatever you were reading. Indeed, reading through web-browsers, you are also
unlikely to finish reading a whole
article at all but to have jumped off to do something else such as check email, or
play a game.

The superficial and distracted style of reading this engenders is only amplified by
the modern tabbed browser,
which encourages us to open many windows to track what we think we might be
interested in. Opening tabs may feel
like it helps us keep track of other avenues we may follow-up later, yet research
suggests most of us never read
most of the tabs we open or read no more than a few lines from each. Indeed, we
often forget whatever we were looking
for in the first place.

Or take what is now a fundamental technology of the internet: Google Search. Google
tends to trump any other research
technology we might use to locate information because it is just so useful. And yet
it has a number of structural failings.
It is highly selective of some sources over others and often they are not the most
reliable; it also leaves information
that we might be interested in out of returned search results and is fairly easy to
bias by the unscrupulous. Some of the
prominent results it produces are merely sponsored content that conduct the unwary
to whatever distractions advertisers
have paid for. It customizes itself to our apparent interests and thereby creates a
sort of bubble around us, filtering
out much of that which we might want to know about. Indeed, Google increasingly
uses profiling information to try to guess
what its users might want to see based on their search history, thus creating a
sort of individualized pre-filtered
bubble around them. This ‘service’ is something most of its users are unaware of
and may have unfortunate effects in
eventually filtering our relevant information, which just does not accord with a
user’s history up until now
(see: Pariser, 2011).

Carr claims these are essential problems, because Google’s basic financial model
works by distracting us from whatever
it was we thought we were looking for to whatever it may be that Google advertisers
would like to pay for. Google Search,
 Carr claims, has this tendency toward distraction written into its DNA. It is
inherently an engine of distraction.
In short, Carr represents the internet as a dissipater of knowledge that is
ultimately poised to undermine the autonomy
of our minds.

I think you can argue with all of Carr’s claims but not necessarily on the grounds
that the research is wrong or that
he mischaracterizes current internet technologies. He does tend to miss much of
the context in which the trends he point
to have evolved in the world beyond the screen. On a technical level, it now
appears that hypertext is not best used
simply translating an existing text, and it often is distracting when attempting to
read an article in depth, and much
less good at facilitating understanding and recall than the hype would suggest
(Rouet, 1996). This is one reason many
millions of readers now choose to print off articles or increasingly use e-paper
devices like Kindle to read offline.
Nevertheless, hypertext is still a brilliant way to connect articles together and
it seems to be more a job for designers
to work out how to do this without distracting the reader.

Search technology as currently constituted does build in all manners of biases but
it is really only the problem it is
because so few people understand how it works and many seem to believe it is far
more reliable and comprehensive than
it really is. It is mainly the idea that it is infallible and the only source that
makes us vulnerable to it.
Some attempts to teach students more systematically about how these resources work
might counteract some of the worst
trends (although see Bartlett & Miller, 2011, for how this is perhaps not
happening in schools just now).
Most readers are of course more skeptical than they are given credit for here as
elsewhere.

What Carr elides is that what we are really talking about the particular form the
technology is taking now, and
that form is in motion. Reading done through a web-browser on a screen most likely
will be less in depth and less
distracted when compared to reading from a traditional book. But the internet does
add a tremendous amount to the speed
of the research process and particularly finding things to read. Shallow browsing,
if that is all the reading we do,
could certainly would be intellectually incapacitating, but this misses what many
of us do with the internet.
Many of us use to the internet to find things to read that we use in other ways
later. Moreover, it is surely
significantly that these technologies from iPhones or android devices, to
Facebook, to Google search are all highly
customizable and open to different patterns of use. For example, the market for
apps make mobile devices highly
customizable in ways that no previous technology has been. Internet technology in
particular is open to us because
we keep remaking it to do the things we need, rather than what it was necessarily
designed for. We remake it or can
insist others do so, or there is always potential for software designers to step in
and reshape the technology into
something we might find even more useful. One does not have to be a wild optimist
to think we may eventually overcome
some of the difficulties to which Carr draws our attention. It is difficult to see
why these should be regarded as
essential problems.

And then there is the flipside of the internet´s capacity to distract: the amount
of cognitive time that
the internet frees up for collaboration, Clay Shirky calls this The Cognitive
Surplus (2010). One of the most
interesting aspects of a technology like Wikipedia is that it is built from tiny
fragments of time which the technology
allows to be composed into something—its many flaws acknowledged—which is free and
fundamentally useful.

Really there is nothing essential about search, or browser technology, the mobile
internet, or even the shape of the
commercial funding of the internet that undermines the way we think, our sense of
self, or the sorts of being we are.
It may be the technology is currently embedded in a certain commercial culture and
indeed with a culture of knowledge
which is detrimental to the development of deep thinking, but even if this is the
case, there are so many trends in our
societues which count against the development of knowledge for its own sake that we
can hardly be surprised if these are
reflected and perhaps amplified by certain elements of internet technology. These
are all things that individuals,
designers, programmers, or even (close to my own heart) philosophers could and
should address. We can argue with the
current shape of technology and propose how it might be better. But there is seldom
much engagement in this direction.
More common are dour warnings about our impotence in the face of new technology;
that it is the agent and we the passive
recipient.

This is the real problem, I think: the idea that it is technology itself that makes
us smarter or dumber has come to be
seen as a conventional and unremarkable truth. This is summed up in a word which
is almost unavoidable when we talk
about the way we use technology today: impact. We say the technology impacts us.
Almost any article you read on the use
or effects of the internet (or other technologies for that matter) uses this
metaphor. But technology does not
impact us, at least unless we take a very passive stance on it.

Technologies do not make us dumber or smarter, but we can choose to be smarter by

making the best of what technology has
to offer—but also by thinking much harder about what we want it to do for us. But
we need to start thinking not just
about technology, but also the sort of intellectual and moral beings we want to be,
as this will guide our creation of
technologies. In striving to humanize the internet in this way I think there is
every chance that we can become
‘smarter,’ but this depends on us. No technology will do the job for us.