There’s an interesting review of Susan Greenfield’s book, How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains at the Washington Post you might want to take a look at. Here’s it’s kernel:
Greenfield asserts that the digital revolution exploits our biological propensity for mindlessness. She cites laboratory studies finding that social networking and video gaming trigger dopamine in the same manner as junk food and Ecstasy. Moreover, she contends, because cyberspace lacks causal sequence, is devoid of immediate consequences and gives instant access to information without guidance, our attention spans shrink, deeper thinking declines and interpersonal bonds wither. Hardest hit are “Digital Natives,†whose “impressionable, plastic brains†are born into an environment that upends thousands of years of evolution.
I don’t think that things are quite that bleak. I recall nearly 50 years ago when I was taking a psycholinguistics class the class broke to watch a brand new television program, Sesame Street. After the program we reconvened to discuss what we’d seen. The consensus was that Sesame Street would facilitate something that was already happening, a progressive loss of attention span.
That the new modes of communication will have cognitive, behavioral, and social effects can hardly be denied at this point. My nieces and nephews find the movies of 70 years ago very difficult to follow. It isn’t the social differences but that the approach to storytelling used is just too leisurely for them. IMO the high speed, high reward, and non-linear approaches to communication will change what makes sense to people in ways that are hard to predict. My suspicion is that the people of the future won’t “lose their minds” but those minds will be less like our than ours are like the minds of people who lived 300 years ago with the exception of memory. Memory will be nearly forgotten. Why remember anything when you can just google it?
What’s striking is that the ‘mind’ being described is purely compulsive. I can’t remember if print (according to McLuhan) is hot or cold as a medium but to me there’s no sense of helplessness in reading a book, even if it’s a book you keep on reading when you should be sleeping. Compare that to reading a ton on the web–link after link on wikipedia. To me, having performed both, they are very different phenomenon. (And I imagine following links on wikipedia is surface to the depths of spending endless amounts of time on twitter.)
One of the things that really does not exist when you think of mind as part of a feedback loop where endlessly familiar things come to you is the idea of strange becoming familiar. Like learning a language, or hearing a piece of music several times before understanding it, or getting to the heart a poem’s sense. This is why classical music, as we understand it, is basically a specialized field and not only the super-difficult post-serial composers but a late quartet of Beethoven’s as well. Will Self, the novelist, thinks that the literary novel is on the same trajectory. He might be right.
Photographs, radio, IPA, print, lecture, film, and books are examples McLuhan gave of “hot media”. Cartoon, telephone, pictographic writing, speech, seminars, television, and comics were examples of “cold/cool media”.
“Hardest hit are “Digital Natives,†whose “impressionable, plastic brains†are born into an environment that upends thousands of years of evolution.”
Counterpoint: Why digital natives prefer reading in print.
I think my kids prefer reading for pleasure in print. There are funner things to do with a computer or Kindle I guess.
For me a more well-balanced life leads to greater optimal outcomes. It makes no difference where such a balance is applied, because when a person puts too much weight, time, emphasis in one area, ignoring another, some kind of imbalance usually manifests itself. For instance, kinesthetically one can develop a myriad of chronic problems, when physically compensating for a weakness or injury elsewhere in the body.
When it comes to the new ease of instant communication or knowledge gratification, so too do aspects of disequilibrium evolve. IMO, one would be the erosion of individual critical thinking, problem-solving skills. Another would be the creation of a more isolated (perhaps polarized) society, mesmerized by TelePrompTer-like screens streaming everything to them, versus a reliance on face-to-face contact where the dynamics of actual conversation and personal interaction can more fully and honestly interplay.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a cousin who relayed a recent dialogue she had with a young woman. Texting was the topic, and a question was asked why this woman texted far more than picking up a phone, directly talking to a person. The answer was, “I don’t know how to say good bye to people, Texting is a far easier way to do it.” So it is that we are increasingly handling not only some of the structural content of communication in a remote fashion, but also rendering emotional interactions to being impersonally conveyed via cyber space. It’s become a common way to even break up with a person!
Paper is a better technology for reading than screens. Translucency, resolution among other factors.
On reading for school work, my link seems to support the notion that reading comprehension and recall is improved in print. Digital natives prefer print unless they have a course in which a search function is very valuable, or if the e-text book is free.
I doubt memory will lose out at the upper ends of cognitive function, at the very least. Just looking things up will do no good for anyone from mathematicians to chess players, to cite two I’m familiar with. In chess, especially, the digital age is putting an ever greater premium on memory. Kind of scary to hear some 1400 kid start spouting off the latest Grunfeld theory from the morning’s Svidler game in Tblisi, especially given that he’ll have checked it against a 3200 monster engine. Scarier still to have to play the little bastard….
Well, this mindless digital dopamine addict notice that this came right after a citation of laboratory studies:
“Moreover, she contends, because cyberspace lacks causal sequence, is devoid of immediate consequences and gives instant access to information without guidance, our attention spans shrink, deeper thinking declines and interpersonal bonds wither.”
What a load of pablum masquerading as science.
Yeah, Andy, I’m with you. My interpersonal bonds are no more withered now than before I got online. In fact, if anything I’m doing better online in that regard than in person. (But enough about my sister and BiL….)
I’ll just add that either online or in real life, sometimes an obituary can just make your day.