Are Digital Habits Making People Dumber?

Are Digital Habits Making People Dumber?
by Takara Alexis

A century ago, when the telephone first started to become widely used, the major question was that people would get overwhelmed with information and wouldn't be able to handle it. When radio-the first electronic medium-started to spread rapidly across the world, some thought it would destroy the family way of life as then lived, bringing the world into the home and, with it, the outside influences and different ways of seeing the world.

When television starting booming in the United States between 1947 and 1955, there were plenty of social ruminations about how it would kill reading and that literacy rates would diminish as everyone lost the desire to read. Around this same time, there were two new art forms that were going to the lead the way to the destruction of the moral fabric: comic books and rock 'n' roll. While these were not new technologies, they were social phenomenon based on technologies.

Recently, there's been a lot of discussion that asks whether our on going addiction to all things digital is making us dumber. Commentators-including President Barack Obama-have addressed how adults are increasingly suffering from digital distraction and are losing the skill to focus for long periods of time.

The Internet, the connectivity all our digital devices provide us and the increasing new ways to combine these forces is one of the most trans formative events in the history of human communication. It has, is and will profoundly change our lives, individually and collectively. It is here to stay and will only increase in speed, magnitude and effect going forward. It's a force that can positively change us in the coming decade.

Every time there is a new, transforming technology, it always causes concern. When Gutenberg invented the movable type press in 1455, the following decades were full of distress. What would reading do to the acquisition of knowledge? At that time, the common belief was that one could not learn unless one wrote things down and that reading would never become a way to learn. This position was propagated by the entrenched interests at the time-the scribes who wrote all the manuscripts.

One of the reviews of our addiction to digital devices is that we are always checking them for email, texts and notifications, feeling we have to constantly be in connection with others. That's certainly true, but it is not something surprising. Whenever some new technology comes along that expands our ability to see beyond our physical reality, it immediately fascinates us.

One of the main criticisms of our use of the Internet is that we are becoming superficial, jumping around from website to website. Our incessant use of search engines is viewed as being fake. Everything I want to know about anything in the world is right there on the computer screen or the tablet screen or the smart phone or the app phone. To have the power to search for just about anything and find it instantaneously makes the acquisition of knowledge and information immediate and available to anyone with an Internet connection. Few scholars in recorded history have ever had that chance. Now, it is a reality for us all. No wonder we are fascinated with the wonderful access of it all!