Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Has technology killed thinking and is the internet making us stupid?

In this age of distraction, social media, high-speed internet, HD TV and movies, are we losing our ability to think?  The following map shows the average time people spend thinking and relaxing and it averages less than 15 minutes a day.  Is this enough time for people to make good decisions or to come up with creative, innovative new ideas or products?  

"Evidence issurfacing that we are losing more than our power of concentration to our addition to the Internet.  When we are on the Net, our prevailing operational mode is one of retrieval, not retention. The problem with that is that our brains' neural pathways are only as good as the cognitive tasks we ask them to perform. When they do not make the effort to retain, they lose their ability to do so. We count on the Net to do our storing for us, but retention is not just passive storage that we can delegate to a machine. The accumulation of retained knowledge allows us to trace the connections wit which we make sense of the world" (Forni, 2011).  We are now relying on Google or other search engines to do our thinking for us.  It is even more important for everyone to be a skeptical, critical thinker as much of the information on the internet is false. 

A friend recently arrive to my house for a party.  I had a large bunch of balloons outside of my house and had given everyone instructions on how to find my home.  However she was navigating by her phone App and walked right past my home twice while looking at her phone.  She told us the funny realization when she looked up and saw the balloons.  While this was a funny occurrence, I worry that people will lose the ability to navigate in the real world without access to a smart phone. Are there other skills and abilities that we may be losing from using technology?

1 comment:

  1. What a funny and yet alarming story! It's a wonder how we got anywhere successfully before GPS...

    Your post reminds me of a meme that I saw which read, "So it turns out that being an adult is mostly just googling how to do stuff." It does seem that generations before would have had to remember a lot more. On the other hand, they wouldn't have had access to the sheer volume of information, nor the expectation to "know" quite as much.

    This also made me think of Bloom's Taxonomy. If we're able to retain, are we also less able to understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create? Or do these things somehow look different?

    So much to think about! Can't wait to read more!

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