Keith Richardson
I appreciate any feedback readers have to offer. This month I’m seeking email responses on a couple of questions:
1. Do you use social networking (Facebook and/or Twitter, for example), and if so, how? Are you mainly an observer of a family member’s Facebook page, do you contribute to others’ Walls, and/or do you maintain an active Facebook page yourself? I think it would be interesting to know, too, whether you’re in your 50s, 60s, 70s, or older.
2. Do you see any effects one way or another among your children and grandchildren who are active social networkers? Perhaps the broader question should be “Is social networking changing the way society interacts, or is society changing such that social networking is required?”
Last June, Bloomberg Businessweek, in an article entitled “Albert Einstein Never Tweeted” discussed Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. To find the article online, google “fostering stupidity.” Also look up Jonah Lehrer’s New York Times review, “Our Cluttered Minds” .
Carr’s thesis is that “our constant inundation with electronic stimuli is changing the brain’s wiring.” And not for the better. We are “training our brains to pay attention to crap.” The Internet is largely about distraction and “the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctly human forms of empathy, compassion, and emotion.”
Carr’s assessment provokes divided opinion. Unsure how seriously to take Carr’s warning, Lehrer points out that anxiety about the impact of technology on our minds has existed since the days of Socrates who “lamented the invention of books…. In the 17th century, Robert Burton complained, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, of the ‘vast chaos and confusion of books’ that make the eyes and fingers ache. By 1890, the problem was the speed of transmission: one eminent physician blamed ‘the pelting of telegrams’ for triggering an outbreak of mental illness. And then came radio and television, which poisoned the mind with passive pleasure. Children, it was said, had stopped reading books. Socrates would be pleased.”
While Peter Burrows in Businessweek also gives considerable space to critics who pooh-pooh Shadows’ apprehension, he appreciates Carr’s asking the question. Will the Internet actually cause the brain to take its first step backward in centuries? “Our cave-dwelling ancestors were consumed with immediate concerns-run from the lion, kill the mastodon, get out of the rain. Then various media provided an abstract way of thinking about the world. The map helped us explore other lands, establish trading routes, and draw up battle plans. The clock and calendar raised our productivity by enabling us to organize our time. Then came writing. Over time, especially after Gutenberg, the book turbocharged our ability to think conceptually and deeply about the world around us.”
“Americans now spend 8.5 hours a day frenetically interacting with their PCs, TVs, or, increasingly, the smartphones that follow them everywhere. In the process, writes Carr, we are reverting to our roots as data processors. ‘What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.'”
Do some research, and let me know your thoughts-preferably before the middle of this month. In March we’ll examine how communications technology is also affecting our physical well being.
Thanks to reader June F, I’ll be speaking to members of the Newton Seniors Centre on the afternoon of February 21. I’m looking forward to meeting more of you there!