How the Web Became Our ‘External Brain,’ and What It Means for Our Kids
wired.com
wired.com
"Some experts expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people become shallow consumers of information, endangering society."
A key part of this argument is that people are becoming (or are going to become) more shallow than those in the past. But how shallow were people in the past? I have a sneaky suspicion that many of these dissenters are just being nostalgic. Anything beyond their own lifespan is also questionable--how do we know how well people were able to focus in previous generations? Are people _really_ more shallow than they used to be, or does it just feel like that?
This whole topic incredibly nebulous, so I question the value of jumping to these conclusions when we don't even have a clear understanding of what we're talking about in the first place.
But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Plato, Phaedrus 274c-275b)
A more modern critique could talk about personalized caching/flushing strategies and the role of latency in: brain memory, motor memory, paper, offline device, online device, public search, private search & classified search.
"Memory Palaces" are still used today, see http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/remembering-as-an-e... and http://artofmemory.com/
20 years later: "OMG kids these days are so accustomed to 3D holographic interfaces, they can't seem to comprehend any information presented on a flat surface!"
The only solution to shallow thinking is a good education that encourages critical thinking about things that matter. Electronic gadgets are little more than convenient scapegoats that people can safely blame in order to divert attention from their failure to come up with a proper solution.
I don't think I agree with this. What I do agree with is that modern society, and especially internet usage, seems to degrade the ability to concentrate.
I know that if I have to spend too much "computer time", my ability to stay focused and think hard about a single task seems to degrade. For one example, it takes me 2 or 3 books until my ability to concentrate and read the book flows rather than requiring actual willful effort.
A good test might be how people fare when stripped of their technology and conveniences, for some definitions of faring and technology. Testing this ethically might be tough, though.
I would choose a society where everyone knew how to use google, wikipedia, and google scholar over one where every individual could list off the pressure, temperature, and catalyst of the Haber process any day of the week.
Yeah, kids these days with their "clothing" and "language" and "fire" have it so soft. Clearly we should worry about how well they would fare without those things.
Language becomes unnecessary at that point.
:)
I imagine they would just visit the library.
We were all told we have to memorize things because we can't carry the textbook around with us, that's simply not true anymore.
Filling our brains with dates for civil war battles and the dates of birth/death of random authors was completely pointless.
I think that more critical thinking style education will certainly be a good thing.
Educational material should focus much more on how to keep kids interested in the material rather than making sure you know every detail of every event.
I think the educational system needs a major overhaul. Let kids learn the subjects that interest them at their own pace rather than constant exposure to random bits and pieces. Or at least try it, now that technology is so cheap and powerful we can track and allow access to everything imaginable for education (other than instant learning, but it's probably not too far off).
If I had something like Khan Academy and a tablet in school it would be amazing. Now would be a great time to be starting school, you still need teachers and parents that are willing to inspire and know how to appeal to the interests of children of course.
I was told to memorize things because it's much faster to recall items than it is to look them up.
I also don't consider memorizing certain historical facts "pointless", I think they are vital for context. The birth/death dates of a certain author may have little value in of itself, but it may have a lot of to say about the era they lived in and how/why their works were/are relevant.
Agreed that "critical thinking style education" is worlds better than mere memorization, but let's not forget that the devil is in the details, and its those details that you benefit most from memorizing.
As technogy gets more integrated into our lives (think Siri), that could drop as low as 30 or even 15 seconds.
What's important is that you are able to have an informed and intelligent discussion about the topics you learn in school. The exact year of the Emancipation Proclaimation is less important as long as you understand the events around it. Same thing with the melting point of Gallium. There's no need to memorize that, as long as you understand the general concept that Gallium melts at a very low temperature, and what this means in terms of its uses.
The issue is more subtle than that. In lots of cases the value of knowing the information is when it lets you make connections that you wouldn't otherwise have _realised_ were important.
Let's say you're reading something that happens to mention The Alhambra Decree. You've never heard of this before, so you do a quick Wikipedia lookup, where the first paragraph says:
"The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on 31 March 1492 by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by 31 July of that year."
If that "1492" is a well primed trigger point for you — especially in a context involving Spain — you're much more likely to pause for a second and wonder if this might be related to anything else you know about that year. And, although the remainder of this page never mentions Columbus at all, it doesn't take you much searching to discover that there are indeed some very interesting connections between the two, some of which lead to further questions about Columbus' own religious background and leanings.
But if that 1492 doesn't have that trigger effect, you're much less likely to draw any connection here, and simply nod and return to your original reading.
We do that all the time. There are so many things that pass us by constantly because we simply don't even realise there's anything worth paying attention to. The more hooks we create in our brains for those to get snagged on in passing, the deeper you start to understand things, and the more interesting life becomes.
Students are not willing to learn those details and it turns them off to school and wastes valuable time that could be utilized to better prepare them for the real world.
How many professions could use ANY of the information you mentioned in your post?
There isn't any evidence that I'm aware of that there has been any noticeable change in people's abilities to do actual, focused work: studies today show that most people can at most manage around 4-5 hours of focused work, and as far as I know that hasn't changed much in the last 200+ years. Ritalin can allow a healthy person to put in bursts of 10+ hours of focused work. Of course students are going to take advantage of that. My understanding is that it's also fairly common in other high pressure situations that require prolonged focus (stock trading, etc.).
Things like the web/etc. do allow people to do more multitasking-esque behaviors (with the obvious impacts on focus), but that's less about people's brains being rewired at some fundamental level and more that there are now more opportunities to goof off. Pre-internet, you had a much higher activation energy of chatting with friends (you had to go call them and talk with them, versus clicking three times to get to Facebook). I don't think that's limited to people in the younger generation, though: one of my family members (an English professor, one of the top in her field in the world) will sometimes turn off the internet/block distracting sites while writing and does all of her editing away from the computer in order to avoid Facebook/reading the news/playing scrabble against the computer.
Learning date ranges is important, what years the wars started and ended (approximately), what period of time an author was born (1700s, 1800s, etc). Knowing a specific date and being tested on knowing that exact number is completely pointless.
If you fill your head with dates that you do not recall often, then they can often get confused, you think you remember what date something happened and spit out the wrong one.
We prevent the rewriting of history by distributing the writing as widely as possible. And that's precisely what the internet is doing.
Physical distribution of acid-free paper books are better at preserving history.
Edit: blog post by archive.org on digital preservation efforts for Wikipedia outbound links: http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/
I don't doubt that those books have better survivability, but they also represent only the tiny fraction of written information that was worth publishing in book form.
archive.org is a great example of how a relatively small nonprofit organization can now afford to archive historical information at volumes that were previously impossible.
Edit: try using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag... or similar extension to find caches/archives of dead links that are no longer online at an alternate address. Agreed that link rot is not the same as offline content, but there is digital content which can no longer be found in any archive or search engine.
http://fileformat.info covers issues related to digital preservation.
Content that is initially valued is duplicated. Content that isn't dies away. It isn't like things being digital makes them more transient, instead it makes rare copies far more accessible.
History is written by winners, who change over time and have been known to rewrite history. Digital formats require constant transformation from legacy formats to modern formats (per http://fileformat.info). This has an economic cost and only a subset of content is prioritized for forward migration, depending on which parties wield economic power at that time.
A book on acid-free paper that has a reasonable print run will be stored in geographical locations worldwide and will preserve information for decades if not hundreds of years, without requiring battery power, OS upgrades or file format migration.
History is also about economics. Digital storage economics is increasingly driven by cloud vendor bulk manufacture of custom servers and data centers, e.g. OpenCompute. Centralized copies can be rewritten. If local communities start building their own https://archive.org/web/petabox.php to record local/global digital history in archival file formats, maybe digital can record long-term history, EMPs not withstanding.
Wikipedia is about 10 GB compressed, meaning that anybody can download a copy and save it forever, for free.
If you include the discussions pages, images, and revisions of Wikipedia it amounts to several terabytes worth of data. (A couple of hundred dollars for a hard-drive that size).
There are many backup mediums that are meant for long-term storage. EMP protection is relatively easy.
How many "acid-free paper books" would it take to store that information?
It does not protect against rewriting history, one could argue that Wikipedia exists to rewrite history based on the latest consensus and reduction of controversy. While anyone could review the change history, in practice most readers use the latest version. There is at least one research paper showing a steady decline in Wikipedia contributors due to tough editorial policies created to thwart spammers.
Books are decentralized from both a physical and editorial point of view. Look back at any major event in history and there will be multiple records and perspectives of the event. Decentralized locations record the subset of events that are locally most important.
At any rate, it's not an either/or situation. Digital will coexist with print and paintings and sculpture and architecture. Each has a different information density, diversity and preservation profile.
I fully understand that if the internet were to disappear tomorrow that I would be very lost but it's not something worth preparing for IMHO. While I agree with preparing for the future I do not think preparing for the fall of humanity/technology to be a good use of my time. Call me naive or stupid (or lazy), you may be right, but I find little advantage in remembering large swatches of information when it can be called up (from either local copy or the internet) at will. It's one reason I vehemently opposed the C++ exams I took in college that required me to know the boilerplate of a C++ program as there would never be a time in my life that I could imagine I would be without an IDE or the internet to generate/fetch it for me.
I'm not saying that I think this is a "more advanced" way of living/existing but just that it is the way I live/exist. I have friends who have expressed similar feelings but I'd be very interested in what both people older and younger and I think/feel about this issue.
What worries me is that your "pointer latency" makes it increasingly difficult to get those aha moments. Vast amounts of knowledge at our fingertips but very little understanding and wisdom.
As for education systems, I (mostly) agree with this dude: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...
I'm one of the older btw :) 35yro.
What's the techno-environmental equivalent to random mutations? Remix culture, open-source software, fan fiction, fair use, cross-corporate IP licensing, emergent outcomes of search engine SEO and Google's top ten revenue categories?
If we are going to expose children to technology, should we expose them to open-ended technology with many degrees of freedom and possible innovation, or walled gardens/devices with a limited menu of pre-approved operations?
If one is always used to having the information at one's fingertips, then how does one acquire the ability to "figure things out"?
Isaac Asimov touches on something along these lines in his wonderful story -- "Profession" ( http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php )
Memory training speeds up the recognition of design patterns, http://www.patternlanguage.com/
.. and anti-patterns, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthAndLies
Surely those two points are incongruous.
One could argue that this happens to a certain extent with every generation, however, and it is not necessarily a new thing. One might also argue that as technology changes faster, the inter-generational gap grows larger. One might also argue that while our adult brains change more slowly than a toddler brain, they do keep changing which might mean the difference is not so large after all. Interesting questions to be sure.