It’s a no sage digital age. Drowning in data, yet thirsting for knowledge.

I used to think it was funny that my grandparents couldn’t program the VCR. I’m now 39, and I don’t text or tweet. I don’t have a camera on my cell phone and I only use it about 25 minutes a month.

I suspect this is a part of our evolution and we aren’t likely to “unplug”, and I doubt that even the experts or authorities know where it will take us.

I just wish I didn’t feel like my grandparents at 39!

ever find yourself talking with a friend while you’re both online on your own laptop? and you’re both in the same room?

i like having a video camera on my phone but i don’t like the obsessiveness with communication (much of it trivial) that “smart” phones seem to bring out in people.

I heard that because people are often on the web so much and the use of google so much that it’s actually regressing our brains capacity to concentrate.

I’m curious if there have been studies with children in the classroom and the amount of time on the internet.

I decidedly do not text. I tried as long as I could to forgo cell phone use but acquiesced to their charms about four years ago. It is useful when traveling, especially. I don’t use it for work purposes and don’t tell people with whom I come into contact for work that I have one. I have to admit I can get a bit obsessive about my laptop…

This show will probably be a lot like the one several months back on multitasking, about the effects of distractibility and how not being fully present can influence our experiences in the moment. I don’t believe there are any long term consequences to brain function (for the fully developed, mature brain anyway), but I do think multitasking can have a short term consequence of not being able to sustain focus on one task enough to really devote complete energy to it. I also think a sense of constant connectivity to the outside world can promote a compulsive quality in we humans. Are we so important that we need to be completely accessible 24/7, or have access 24/7? I know I’m not and don’t access all of the time.

Last line: “I know I’m not and don’t WANT access all the time.” I was distracted…

What Brett said with one addition:

Not being able to sustain focus long enough to devote complete energy to it may come with the problem of passing over more nuanced ideas. Deeper literacy can allow less snap judgement, more consideration of complexity.

I don’t think technology precludes digging deeper but one has to do the digging and not everyone does.

Google News makes it easy to scan headlines but how many folks dig a bit deeper by clicking the link to all the stories and then scanning even the sources they find don’t support their viewpoint?

As a former teacher of middle school-age children, I found myself appalled by how uncritically those young brains assumed that whatever they were seeing and reading on the Internet – UTube, blogs, Wickipedia, whatever – was true and irrefutable just because it came to them via computer.

I’ve been to workshops on the way the brain works where I’ve been told we need a change every twenty minutes to keep our brains active. Is it coincidence that that’s the length of so many TV shows minus the commercials? Surely all these technologies leave significant imprints, on the mature brain (still developing according to the latest research) and the immature ones. And I agree with whoever said we don’t really know where it’s all going, but perhaps it’s a good idea to pay attention to how brains appear to be developing and not just acquiesce to it. Every widely embraced technology gets oversold; over time we find out what it is really good for and in what ways it’s harmful.

I totally agree with Nicholas Carr. If you have any tendency towards ADD, woe is you in this digital age. I see kids having difficulty getting homework done and it’s no wonder when a beep or a song or tune interrupts every few minutes to alert them (us) that an email, voice mail, text, FaceBook update or other seemingly urgent communication has arrived. Ned Hallowell (ADD guru) suggested using a program that turns off what is distracting while you are trying to work. I am looking forward to trying this so that I am not tempted to stray (But beware, once you tell the program, for example, to not let you on GMail for the next two hours, there is no going back).

Also, a pet peeve: when people are on their iPhones or Blackberries when they are in the room with others. Hello! I am right here, you can communicate with me. If you’re not a heart surgeon–turn it off!

“Beware reading and writing. Your memory skills will deteriorate.” Yep.

“Beware the wired planet. You won’t want to slog thru too-long New Yorker articles, or endless volumes of dang-he-needed-a-dominating-editor Freud’s dreams.” Yep.

Wired life gives our minds wings.

Total agreement w Carr.

I’ve been in software technology for 40 years. At least 20+ years ago there were stories/studies of how it took at least 15-20 minutes for someone to dive into a state deep concentration for problem solving. Get interrupted at minute 18? Zingo… all that time was wasted.

Flitting from pretty picture to pretty picture does not help one’s understanding.

It’s popular to say: “A picture is worth 1,000 words.” Well why then does it take 1,000 pictures to actually say anything?

I think we’re learning on the net to notice more. To me, a great deal of education was repetition. Peter Rabbit, read 300 times. The Pledge of Allegiance, repeated 3,000 times. In church, morning prayers, a creed repeated countless times. What one learns is to incorporate without considering. One absorbs uncritically.
On the net, one considers, then links. At first one doesn’t remember that much. Then one learns to remember what order one went, and what to save, what to write down. It requires making judgments all along.
Text reading — newspapers, books — I find I get more from them because of the availability of the net. I’m reading about World War II in a book called My Name was Five, and I have to go on line for Google maps to see the route of escape, the route to smuggle contraband, all that. The two modalities complement each other.

The eminent computer scientist Donald Knuth, author of “The Art of Computer Programming”, gave up using email in 1990. He said:

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.”

Marshall McLuhan “The medium is the message.”

Neill Postman “The medium is the metaphor.”

160 characters represents the message as well as being the message itself. Another example, television requires sound-bites of news that don’t allow lengthy and/or intelligent conversation when it comes to war, economy, politics, religion, etc. However, those topics have consequences outside of the sound-bite passage constrained by the medium.
See Postman’s “Entertaining Ourselves to Death” for excellent case studies that despite being twenty years old remain relevant.

1) Wherein I DISAGREE:

My ex-husband could NEVER read. NOW, with his iPHONE, we puts WHOLE BOOKS INTO A NEWSPAPER COLUMN-WIDTH FORMAT, and he is HALF-WAY THRU Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”!

2) Wherein I DISAGREE because you may be looking at MULTIPLE CAUSATIONS:

I just got over a TWO-YEAR POISONING from a brand-named SUGAR SWEETENER that was in my cereal, without my knowledge. I COULD NOT CONCENTRATE ON ANYTHING; and trying to work with NUMBERS was even WORSE! It was the SUGAR SUBSTITUTE which brought on the almost ADHD-like symptoms. Perhaps other people, too, are experiencing this POISONING in their food, even in their chewing gum, instead of the internet causing distraction!

Thanks!

Your speaker’s example of the conditions under which we evolved is nothing but sheer speculation. It is no more connected to reality than other groundless self-justification thrown out there like the idea of “alpha males” or an inherent homophobia module in the brain. His argument seems little different from older generations grousing about how TV, devil music, or pick your new technology is rotting our brains and destroying society.

It’s not just the existence of the Web, it’s the delivery systems. People have constant access, which is constant distraction.

I do believe this NYT guy misses the big picture. He reminds me of the people who want to defang (to some extent) derivatives, but keep naked collaterized debt swaps, etc. as parasites upon the middle class. Evasive and shallow response.

I’m sure people vary, but after I run around town on my bike and run errands I need to stare at the ceiling and regroup for hours, maybe 7 hours, until I sleep. On the other hand, with the internet, I can “interact” far more without needing the long regrouping time.
Is it deeper thought when I’m regrouping, replaying interactions and so on? It’s very different from the deep concentration that goes into other types of things. When I need to “regroup” after a wrestle with my very-focusing type of work, I usually need to do something very focused but different. Cross-words maybe. I need to get lost elsewhere.
The emotional part matters. All-day tweeters maybe are running AWAY from all the regrouping that lets you mature.

Doesn’t this happen with every new technilogical movement? People used to think the radio turned people into zombies. Maybe listening to the garbage further up the dial I could believe that. Maybe it depends on how you spend your time on the internet? If someone spends their time reading news and participating in forums the effects could be different than someone farting around on facebook, twitter, and google.

One could just as easily argue that the internet and Bootleg have freed us from the need to memorize facts, freeing our minds to tor comprehension, understanding, and analysis. This is not to mention that blogs, chatboards, and the web allow people the freedom to have ongoing discussions and conversations, while conducting normal life.

Nick Bilton, one of the commentators quotes research about laparoscopic surgery. However, that is a task specific benefit of video games regarding hand-eye coordination. Deep thought is important to decide IF surgery is appropriate. That point is lost.

Carr keeps talking about “deep thinking.” How does he (how do you) define “deep”?

I think this is related also – NC please comment on the bits of our brain that perhaps become less nimble as we rely on cell phones that store our numbers and GPS systems whose directions we follow mindlessly? As the need to actually memorize longterm a series of 10 numbers – or read a map and make decisions instead to get where you we are going I fear for my brain as we age as I need to do less of this kind of thinking! And no, at this stage of my life I’m not going to play games to compensate……any suggestions?

I was curious about your guest’s interpretation of e-book readers. Perhaps you are going to touch on this later, but is it the plethora of information a typical website displays or the inherent nature of the digital format itself inherently distracting the reader? I noticed online this morning that apple came out with an updated version of their safari web browser which has a new feature called ’safari reader’. It appears that the feature allows articles within a web page to be viewed as a simple page of text without all the clutter.

I taught an English Composition 122 class a couple of years ago. My classes are considered engaging by students, but yet these students couldn’t learn well. I would teach the same things every week, and they would continue the same problems and tell me I had never taught it. All class, half of them would keep checking messages. They couldn’t focus. They didn’t really get larger points in essays we read. Pieces of time necessary to focus to really learn were always missing because they had to be so on top of there electronics.

I was a technician and carried a laptop all the time, so I’m not a Luddite.

A lot of new tech is about what will make money and how can we increase billable minutes, not what will make better citizens.

A physician/anthropologist wrote the book The Alphabet Versus the Goddes, The Conflict between Word and Image — Leonard Shlain, saying that the learning of the written word, the left side of the brain, created the male chauvinist civilization, the non-emotional society, the competitive society.
Before we learned to read and write, the other side of the mind was the preferred side, the more intuitive, the female side. And women ruled the world, and there was no war.
Oh, I didn’t read it that thoroughly, and it was long ago. I’m trying to type fast here. You get the point.

5 years ago I wrote a poem called “The Net” whose point is that, as fire leapfrogged humanity into civilization and better ways to destroy our bodies and environment, so our outsourced senses, in the form of communications media, have given every human instant contact with and knowledge of the world while distracting us from thinking to the point where we may no longer understand how to think. The poem ends saying that Prometheus can now feel redeemed as we, his beneficiaries, have stolen cyberspace, a much greater challenge to the gods.

One anecdote: When i was a teeenager, I helped out in my parrents’ very successful, first intercontinental bakery in Cambridge, witing on customers and using a non-computerized register. Lines went out to the street as my father, rationed on chocolate, had figured out how to make a double layer chocolate fudge cake without chocolate. Professors came down from harvard to Inman Square to buy our pastry.

I had to figure out, while I was bagging and boxing cake, pastry, cookies, pies, rolls and bread, priced by the single, pound, and dozen, what the goods cost each customer and come up with the answer by th time all was boxed. bagged, and tied up in string. All this with customers at the door calling out to me to hurry up. So I was doing arithmetic hours on end in my head, and discovered base 10, which i’d never been taught, and which made this lightning calculation I had to do possible. I became a whiz kid at it. Sometimes I had to take a piece of paper and demonstrate (with cat calls from waiting customers) my calculatin, and I was always right.

This habit stayed with me all my life. Today, most checkout clerks, in any store, can’t add or subtract without a calculator. Ok, they don’t need to think since they have the calculators. But imagine a world without calculators for business use!

I tell aspiring writers who complain that their problematic computers keep theif production rate down that The Inferno, War and Peace, and Great Expectations were written longhand.

Tom,
I hear a number of your guests and callers saying things like “This lifestyle isn’t going away,” but it seems to me that there’s every possibility that it will. There was a blurb on Morning Edition just today about an increase in solar activity starting in 2013. Large solar storms are a regular occurrence, and it seems like we as a technological society have our collective heads in the sand about the risk. The last couple haven’t really impacted us because we have never been so dependent on electronics before. The next one could easily take out every satellite in orbit and a good chunk of the electronics on the surface. The Internet will be one of the first things to go.

Can your guest speak to how our rapid adaptation to these new mediums and new modes of thought may affect our fitness for survival in the event of the collapse of our electronic society?

An important part of developing the brain (education) is the experience of getting seriously stuck. I recall learning Sudoku and having 10-hour wrestles with it. Someone could have taught me some tricks. But I wore my poor little head out with it. In class, the teacher has to corner students into the painful necessity of exercising that brain — not asking the internet or the equivalent. People have to love that mental ache the way they love the muscle ache after a work-out. Teachers need to teach that love. Then kids won’t want to be distracted.

I just want to weigh in that our technology is absoluty amazing. In school I was terrible at doing research for anything. Now at 30, I can find out anything I want faster that I can say, “I want to know… this.” Using computers has also helped me to compartmentalize the infomation I keep in my head, and therefore ascess new information more clearly.

However, living in the country and do lots of gardening, thre is no time I have more clairty than when I can hear the cows chewing their grass from across the road. Most modern people have lost touch with the slow side of things and our conection to the natural world. In this age of automatically turning to technology for inforation (can you think for me now please, MR. Computer?) we are moving farther from a conection to those roots of being human. I’m not sure that part is a goode thing.

There is NOTHING more annoying, than being at a great live concert, and having 100,000 cell phones in your face by people videotapingon their cells. How about yakking on their cells for people to come to where they are in the group, like the front. Directing others to find a better spot. I was without tv. internet and phone and LOVED IT. I just deliberatly disconnected. I loved it. ONLY because I stil have a 15 yr. old at home who wants it, I am getting it back. I call tell you what the Dali Llama said in a beautiful written peice that I do not have on me at this time…but basically, for all this techonolgy we are not closer to each other, and when a new neighbor moves in nobody bothers to cross the street to say hello. I do not like facebook although I got on, I don’t use it. I think over time you will see a real demise in the human spirit, the human being, due to the removed ness to anything “real” due to technology. I hate it.

I don’t know how your guest can say that the brain was not “meant” to read. Reading to me feels completely natural, so much so that I can’t imagine that while reading my brain is being forced into an unnatural mode.

Reading on a video screen, on the other hand, feels clumsy, uncomfortable, and unnatural. It may have been a fortunate accident, but I think the book is a perfect bit of technology.

The saddest thing that we have lost in the digital age is the daydreaming that used to come in the idle moments. We have filled out idle moments with checking our email or randomly surfing.
Those idle moments of daydreaming are the root of creativity, inspiration and problem solving.

Whither goes our waistline, so shall our minds suffer.

The amoral economic model that so efficiently and scientifically leveraged our human nature to maximize profits to the detriment of the health of our population, e.g.: David Kessler, may have an analogous effect on our brains.

We must make it our mission to educate our people to leverage that greatest of organized matter to make this world into a better image.

I realize that last post makes me sound a bit of an alarmist, even a wacko… but I’m basing the question off information I got right here on NPR. The article I read said there were “huge” storms in 1859 and 1921.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124125001

I have found when teaching in the elementary, junior and high schools that computers and internet are not being used in the best way

As a Classics major, I find the reference to Socrates on the printed word intriguing. Socrates’ concern was that subsequent generations would lose the abilities of individuals such as the bard Homer to memorize and improvise huge quantities of information, because they would have no need for it, as that same information would be easily accessible via books. While the arguments concerning distractions are indeed worth pointing out, what matters in the end is how we are taught to use the tools available to us. If our ancestors had been taught to never memorize and create new information, the written word might well have been too much of a crutch for creativity to thrive. In fact, the opposite occured, because, for 2500 years, liberal arts education has taught individuals to think critically. The same, I hope, will be true with the wired generation, as long as we teach people to use these new tools responsibly.

Interesting to note that the guest who warns that all of this tweeting, etc. is adversely affecting our attention spans goes by “Nicholas,” and the guest who argues to the contrary goes by “Nick.”

I wonder how this ties into diagnosis of ADHD and the medicating of children that goes along with it.

I don’t know if this is going to change kids’ brains physiologically, but with more time spent on-line, when will kids have the time to read (and re-read) the classic works of philosophy, literature, etc. that provide the basis for an enlightened consideration of the present and the future? How can college students have those “deep” conversations without the depth that you can only get from sustained engagement with long works? You can’t get that from the internet in any way that I know of!

It is necessary to determine the effect on children. Those of us engaging in this discussion are adults who were raised with web-alternative avenues for creativity and deep thinking. We have histories and habits of alternatives to the web-based life. What about the children who were never exposed to life without the web????????????????????

Two comments:

The sources of information are not ‘juried’: when we do research, e.g., at a library , we are dealing with scholarship that has had to be verified. On the internet the validity of information is not certain, reliable.

Second: the information now, that is legit, is often only available through pay, memberships, etc.

This debate — does technology-induced-multitasking help or hurt our brains and culture? — focuses solely on formats of information technology, while failing to recognize that all activities create information inputs, and affect our brains.

The opportunity to sit down and read a lengthy novel or indeed a jeremiad against the latest technology is a privilege of time, energy, and economy. I find it notable, for instance, that nobody has raised one of the most scattering and unfocused activities that adults engage in: childcare, particularly of toddlers. Try reading a novel with a two-year-old in tow.

Perhaps our speakers could address gender and class and how they inflect neuroscience research on leisure activities and the impact on creativity and thinking.

I find that students in elementary and high schools are racing to get regular work done in order to go on line with a computer, sacrificing the educational experience. It would be foolish to have this discussion without bringing in the obvious about the internet, it is mostly used for entertainment, it is often dumbing down the population that indulges with great sacrifice of time. The bad things on line are a distraction to young minds and the addictive pornography and video games fry many minds. The private sector does not support the internet unless there is money to be made, marketing keeps the internet going, keeps people buying computers in order to access and also keeps people addicted to the internet. The problem is seven fold and deep. Our youth are getting lost in the internet, creativity as the speakers are talking about it will occur without the internet, afterall, the internet is a result of creativity. We do not need to maximize all the things the speakers are talking about.

We are using the excuse in schools that computers are the future, however, we are training our children for jobs that will not exist, these jobs are all outsourced. The internet in America today is mostly for entertainment and it is chewing up what little is left of the traditional family.
John Thomas
518-926-9200

I need about half an hour to unwind before sleep after a long day of data processing.

I think most people use TV to do the same and turn on some mindless tv show.

I don’t have tv, by choice, and either read or just think. I don’t think people do that much now, just sit and think. We have no time!

The difference is that today if one doesn’t know what “existentialism” means, one can search it and get it defined in milliseconds, but rarely discuss or argue over the concept. This is the norm.

All things in moderation….right now I”m eating my lunch, answering my email, and listening to Tom….AND I just donated to WBUR as I got an email into my inbox from them !! Then, I’m going to go read a book.

As a pediatrician, I have been saddened over the past fifteen years seeing how children’s imaginations decreased as there knowledge of tv characters and video games increase. So many children have no idea how to entertain themselves, how to play.

Will these future legistators create quick legislation without truly thinking and debating about ALL the issues and ideas? Can the newest generations ever craft a constitution without thinking beyond now now now?

I have a HUGE problem with this “generational” divide. Who the heck invented all this technology? That would be “old” (another work I hate) folks in their 40’s, 50’s and up. I guess that would mean we understand how to use it. This country has a big problem with age. Physically I want to be 22, mentally 50 is good, really good! Why do we constantly strive to divide the generations in this country???

All I know is my husband has been using the internet at MIT since the early 1980’s…
I find good conversation on fbk and maybe I’m just lucky but my friends are multi-generational and very intelligent – and they all read books – both the kind you have to hold in your hands and on the kindle.

I want to thank Nicholas Carr for raising this topic. As a mother of two young children, I read many books about how TV and computer technology may affect cognitive development of young children. The technology’s impact on adult brain is very much under-studied, but I believe is affecting our brain the same way. I find myself jump around a lot on-line because I am so easily distracted by other interesting links. Not that the availability of information is a bad thing but it doesn’t encourage deep thought and understanding of a topic.

The lone writer, the lone scholar — there is something very democratizing to being able to not only speak but to be heard, by interested people, without having a Ph.D. in the subject or having an editor and publisher standing behind your bona fides.
Very democratizing. Farewell the era when only the exceptional dared raise their hands in public culture. The idiots now have their own forums. No, no, back up. Everyone’s voice gets its own valid place, eventually — one hopes.

As someone with ADD I’ve thought alot about different levels of focus. (contrary to popular belief people with ADD can focus, just not on command) When I was in school it seemed that the educational system was overly focused on paying close attention all the time. Sustained attention is very important but wider focus has a value as well. I think that it will become increasingly important to learn both modes of thought, when to use them and how to switch between them when necessary.

I can’t believe what I just heard. So kids would be better off playing a video game about WW2 instead of reading books on the subject. So does that mean we will have “Auschwitz” the video game. This is absurd and to think a video game can replace The Diary of Anne Frank.

We are witnessing a generation of child, raised by daycare/ babysitters, pre-k d-k, and not their mothers. We are going to see a generation of child who grow up with a screen for entertainment. After traveling all over the world, I think the people who live in under developed countries, are much more intersting people, than the ones who live on technology. I don’t’ buy into the tech life style..I still believe it will be the death of genuine communication, real, person to person, and creativity, writing, painting, playing. It’s a world I have no interst in. Yes I am using a work computer for this but my life outside of work is a natural unwired one, thank god.

But there are a lot of typ-o’s, I’ll give you that!
I meant to say that ‘old’ was another WORD I hate, not work (maybe a freudian slip!).

Eh. How many people are predisposed to deep thinking, deep reading anyway? The people who are going to write significant writing, to produce art, are going to find themselves doing so anyway; in the meantime the rest of us will somehow muddle along whether we find meaning in what we do or not.

The net has a great advantage if you’re looking for a bit of specific information. But on the other hand there is no time for reflection, there is constant distraction, there are an increasing number of people who believe that it is normal to read a newspaper on a computer screen, with advertising flashing in the margins. Half-baked ideas which would have once died a quick and lonely death can now instantly find ten thousand sympathetic listeners. Depth of knowledge seems to be inversely proportional to quantity of information. I just don’t see how this change in something so basic as absorbing information can be an entirely good thing.

I recently found myself engaged in an interesting book, but in almost every chapter I was jumping up and getting on the computer to search for more information on something I had just read. I found that drilling down for more in depth info on the Internet was adding to the reading experience in this case, not distracting from it. It brought certain sections of text to life – not that my imagination wasn’t working – but in a way that let me visit in a much more engaging way, much of what I was reading about. I still went back to the book right away and consumed the written word in just a few sittings but I also now have a much richer understanding of many of the elements I read about. Of course I did not permit any cell phone or other interruptions, but I did make several twitter entries about things I was discovering along the way. Hmmmm… interesting topic of discussion you are on.

Aldous Huxley lays out the proposition of the net in “Brave New World”. You could be involved in all kinds of things as long as it didn’t allow for critical thinking. The whole purpose in Brave New World was to create “model citizens”, those who would be “sedated” through over-stimulizationand thus, not agitators or threats to the status quo…we are there now…the march of the cyborg zombies will be subject to every manufacturing of consent that is needed…

Beth, children’s imagination is sliding. Hmm. Maybe we don’t value letting children be bored. And children never need to create their own meaning. Alas.

Nick here’s a a bit of information for you.
If you do not meet these people, they are not your friends.
People you meet online are nothing more than mere acquaintances at best. Sure there are those who met good friends online but for the most part this is the exception not the rule.

Friends are people you interact with, that have diner with and parties. This is nonsense.

Tom, this was a great discussion on a very important topic. From the moment you introduced it I was relieved that such a champion of conversation skills would take this on. I’ve met a lot of young people who spend a lot of time online and then have high levels of social anxiety in person. I do think that we can adapt to use it better in time though, but it will take some learning.

As for your guest who said that the brain isn’t designed to read, I think that the only thing for which the brain is designed is designing itself.

Again, to everyone who wishes to demonize technology, look at history over thousands of years. New technology always means new power, and power in the wrong context and wrong hands is *always* a bad thing. But the bad is not the technology itself, but rather in the misuse of that technology. The people who want to be shallow and lack empathy will do so whether the web is handy or not. And the people who want to be deep and creative thinkers will only be more facilitated by the ocean of resources hitherto unavailable to their intellectual growth and creativity.

Terry, that’s interesting about Attention Deficit, that one can focus but not on command. I’m inclined to say, isn’t that true of every last one of us to some extent? But anyway, I recall school being demanding of relentless attention too, which I could and did do, but I also recall that I never learned to wire what I learned in that command situation into a relevant ongoing life. I offloaded what I learned the way I offloaded the notes I kept.
A teacher called in who pointed out that students using the internet do discover what they are interested in, and I will never forget that remark. It makes a lot of sense to me. Pre-internet, in my day, one could go through school in command mode, never having the freedom to latch on. Would I ask a teacher, let me read this or that, let me experiment with this or that? No. No such teacher. Also, no such breadth of available materials. We had one textbook, and you’d better take that as gospel and be glad if you have any free brain-time in which to read. I was perhaps lucky to have library books to choose from and no homework till I was in junior high. That gave me some freedom to love books, versus being tied to them. But I don’t think much of force-feeding information as education. It teaches ADHD to those smart enough to evolve that-a-way. We would chant the times tables as if it were a nursery rhyme. Three-year-olds might absorb stuff like that, but we should have been learning stuff (like how to figure out quickly what 6 x 9 is, without memory), not chanting like idiots, years on end.

There’s always a balance that’s been present between shallow and deep thinkers, and there always will be– just like the cynics and pessimists will always choose _only_ to see the bad side of things. That doesn’t mean the good is any less present than the bad, we just feel and are more aware of both sides (or one side, if you have a preference) because of the connectedness technology provides.

(sorry, forgot to mention) Has anyone else noticed the irony that all of us right this second are able to have a more deep and critical look at a philosophical point because the internet allows it? Do the skeptics really believe this is isolated and not widespread? Idiocy exists and will continue to exist regardless. But just think of all the intelligence that the web allows for, too.

In listening to this program (especially the anecdote about the woman who claimed her husband no longer engaged with his family because he was spending so much time staring at various screens and Nick Bilton’s rebuttal that being online/tweeting etc. can actually enhance relationships), I found myself thinking that it is completely possible for people to spend so much time “connecting” with their electronic contacts that they do indeed forget to nurture their relationships with their family/household members. Electronic communication may give us a wider circle of acquaintance, but interpersonal relationships are not necessarily enhanced.

Great show. Important topic. Wanted to call but was driving. I am online a lot and depend on connectivity in my work as a film composer–everyone wants their material yesterday and the ability to produce music at home and send it around the world instantly is a far cry from my college days when professors lectured us on the proper pen nibs to use on our hand-written manuscripts, which took a few days to reproduce on ammonia-smelling paper at the university blueprint office.

As far as deep and long philosophical thinking goes, I would say that it’s deeper and more profound than when I started thinking about consciousness in my early 20’s and began practicing Transcendental Meditation twenty minutes twice a day. Now, as a respite from the many trips I take around the world to perform, and the long hours spent recording and editing in my studio, I take a few hours a day, morning and afternoon to meditate, and several weeks each year go to Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield IA, where 2000 of us sit together for many hours each morning and afternoon practicing the TM technique and advanced programs. The alternation of this deep rest and lively activity cultures the brain to perform optimally while shedding long-buried stresses. I am both hooked on the activity of the Web and thankful to the hours of silence that keep me focused and able to connect deeply with my family, my colleagues and enjoy the wonders of the world outside my laptop screen.

Liz agreed, using technology is not a bad thing.
However when I hear one of the guest, I think it was Nick Bilton, say students could learn about WW2 through a video game I have to push back. This kind of argument is absurd.
Now if he was smart enough to talk about how a well designed 3D interactive game like environment could help in teaching the subject I would agree. Instead he takes the easy way out. To me this said more about this mans complete lack of imagination and creative thought.

Re: reading not an innate capacity – See “Proust and the Squid” by Marion Wolf (ca. 2007, she was on On Point, too, when her book came out) She’s a neuroscientist who explains how we developed the capacity to read…it’s not in our genes. Great book.
Also re: the “wired” life sapping our brains, I wanted to mention that in 1994, just on the cusp of the internet explosion, the great Sven Birkerts published “The Gutenberg Elegies,” a wondrous, literate and prescient book about what was to come — read it and weep.
Most interesting comment above – the one on increased solar activity. Brings to mind the truism that nothing is permanent, not even our vaunted internet. Swoosh, could all be gone in the blink of an eye; we could be starting all over again, might even have to speak directly to one another!! And kinda makes you want to hold on to your [printed] books. Nick (NYT guy) has no clue about what living “in the moment” means. He misses the point entirely. June 8, 2010

“In class, the teacher has to corner students into the painful necessity of exercising that brain — not asking the internet or the equivalent. People have to love that mental ache the way they love the muscle ache after a work-out. Teachers need to teach that love. Then kids won’t want to be distracted.” -Ellen Dibble

Ellen, this is my favorite comment of this thread! I do enjoy bouncing around on these “interwebs,” though, but those visual pops and eye-hand clicks are simply starting points for me.

“I taught an English Composition 122 class a couple of years ago. My classes are considered engaging by students, but yet these students couldn’t learn well. I would teach the same things every week, and they would continue the same problems and tell me I had never taught it. All class, half of them would keep checking messages. They couldn’t focus. They didn’t really get larger points in essays we read. Pieces of time necessary to focus to really learn were always missing because they had to be so on top of there electronics.” -tim

I don’t intend any disrespect, but am I to believe you taught English Composition? Your comment is rife with errors running from verb-tense disagreement to poorly constructed sentences, to misusing “there” in the last sentence instead of the proper “their.” Perhaps you’ve let your students influence you more than you’ve attempted to influence them?

Maybe tim was teaching an ESL class. In my experience, teachers who are not actually afflicted with the subject they teach, wrestling with it daily, those teachers could shift to singing “Some Enchanted Evening” at any moment. Teachers who are corraled into teaching English could be those who happen to know English and have the requisite degrees, not those actually condemned to intoxication by the possibilities of language, the true professional teachers of the subject.
I think the level of the teacher’s engagement with the subject may seem like an affliction, a curse, to the students, but is a necessity (not unlike the violinist’s telltale mark under the chin), if a teacher is going to wire the students in to the subject. The internet is insignificant next to that.
As to primary education, I’m not sure if there is an equivalent.

Fascinating and very thought-provoking. Thanks to Tom and the guests for a great discussion.

I was struck by the vacuousness of Nick Bilton’s response about 45 minutes through the show, after a woman had written in a comment observing how attention fragmenting technology in her household was breaking down the quality of live emotional contact. She had pointed out especially after a conflict her husband would routinely disappear into a video game rather than communicate and address the situation. Mr. Bilton either completely missed or completely avoided her point, asking instead ‘why are video games not a deep activity’. Some people need formal neuropsychology studies to be funded and designed and interpreted before they deign to correlate social dysfunctions back to the increasing fragmentation of our attention spans which has been operating in Western culture over the past three decades or so, (and only rendered more blatant by the Web), but others retain sufficient sensitivity to directly intuit these sorts of phenomena. I suspect Mr. Carr falls into this basket and because he is speaking against the dominant current trends to superfluousness, albeit somewhat cautiously in my estimation, he is getting a critical onslaught directed towards him.

Coincidentally, I received the following missive in my inbox today, which speaks directly about the potential dangers of a social cloud soundbyte culture and it’s effect upon our thinking — something addressed also recently by Jaron Lanier’s new book. Here it is:

=============================
Rereading a book after a few years

If you reread a book after a few years, the text gives you a new experience. The book can appear quite different to me and communicate altogether new contents. From this experience one can see how one changes relative to the text itself that remains the same. One can also gain the insight that “contents” only exist for me through my understanding. Only through my own thinking does a “thought” become accessible to me.

It takes two sides to complete a reality, the author and the reader. If this is not fully understood, dogmas are created. This is when contents are misunderstood or received inadequately. If I receive a “content” in this way, this “not-understood content” forms an enclosure, a place where my consciousness no longer circulates properly. My consciousness then becomes diseased: it tends to be satisfied with this unexamined role of thinking.

This condition of consciousness makes it impossible for a word to have an immediate effect: a person can decide whether to receive it or not. This is the basis of human freedom. Because this is true, demagogues try to reach people by affecting the emotional life, not the thinking life.

Educate Yourself for Tomorrow has many great books in its curriculum for you to test this experience on yourself.

I will be eager to hear from you.

Andrew Flaxman, Director, http://www.onlinehumanities.com
=============================

What an interesting and surprising show. Great questions, Tom. Both guests were engaging and truly on point.

A point on technology I find important is the evolution of video over the last 100 years. It went from big screen in the 1st 25 years to a small screen tv in the 2nd and 3rd 25 year periods. That 1st 25 years was just stage production put on film – very few cuts or pans. The small tv screen forced production to use cuts pans and zooms to get the story across. This is ok (in small amounts.) But now in the 4th set or 25 years we have bigger screens on our tv but we still use the cuts zooms and pans. And we have a larger selection to video so we watch more of it.

It is the cuts zooms and pans that we are now seeing in large numbers on large screens that is causing the problem.

If you take you finger and poke at the side or you eyeball to move it a little the whole visual world moves all over the place. This is because the brain when putting out commands to position the eye or to blink will shut down the visual processing of the input from the eyes. That is why you do not see the room move as you change you eye position.

These cuts and pans are getting around the automatic shut down system of the brain. And the brain seeing this fast change of image thinks it is being approached by a predator.

When you are looking straight on at the tv there is a lot of processing going on at the sub couscous level – so at a couscous level it looks ok. But at a low level the brain is still counting this as a possible predator.

If you look off the one side of the tv you will notice that when there is a cut you get a disturbing feeling in that part of you visual field. This is because the side vision does not do as much pre processing.

Now the effect of this large amount of cuts and pans makes the brain go into a state that favors looking for predators (right brain operation).

So what can we do to get around this changing of our brains operation? We can get rid of the film editors who make the cuts and zooms etc. We do not need the cuts and zooms any more because we now have large screen tvs.
We should be watching stage type productions with very few cuts an zooms and therefore keep our left brain operational.

I am very glad that this topic is being discussed on the show, but I am slightly disappointed that your both the commentators seam to view this issue in such black and white terms.

There are obviously huge advantages of the ,internet, video games, and technology in general. Not just in the field of entertainment, but also in terms of education and training and we absolutely have to embrace and enhance these aspects of technology. On the other hand there can be no doubt that ,facebook, twitter, texting, and the internet/technology has compromised our ability to ,write, read, and think on high levels.

While there are some serious concerns about all this technology eroding our ability to engage on a highly intellectual level we cannot deny the obvious benefits and opportunities that technology offers us.

The internet is a tool, just like any other.

Some people may “dumb” down as you say, but that is their own fault. as for myself I’ve learned how to speak two languages with the multimedia that you say is “dumbing” down our brains, also how to animate in 3d, paint landscapes with photoshop.

Well, this piece could not be more timely. While enduring a catastrophic computer crash that required a whole day of “tech thinking” to troubleshoot, I found myself craving the time to make art with my hands. It felt like a deep hunger. So, I broke the fragmented thinking pattern enforced by this infernal machine and made something beautiful with my hands for awhile.

The deep concentration and meditative freedom refreshed me. Now, it’s back to the salt mines of this dark, satanic console…Hey, William Blake thought about all this stuff back in the 19th century. Anybody remember him? I hope so.

[...] is Doing to Our Brain, which I heard him discuss this morning on the radio show/podcast On Point (digital-tech-and-your-brai). Nicholas Carr has recently written pieces on How Google Makes Us Stupid and also lectures on the [...]

Computer use has changed my brain for sure. Here’s three ways:
1) I found myself a couple months ago in the coffee aisle at the grocery looking for my usual brand. And I “heard” my mind go “CTRL F” as a keystroke shortcut to “find” the right brand by typing in the name.

2) I also find myself thinking “CTRL Z” when I say or do something stupid or careless. “Undo!”

3) One day in class I told my students to “scroll down” the page in their books as they might on a computer screen.

[...] [...]

I find email to be a useful tool, but am not obsessed by it. Simply a tool to be consulted once a day. I also delight in deleting without reading all of those inane, silly, sacharin, schmaltzy, stupid and generally right-wing “forwards” that people send me unsolicited. You know the ones… “10 things my dog taught me about life” and such. Crap…

I will never be a member of Facebook or similar time-wasters and privacy-destroyers. Linkd In either, since that’s just Facebook for people with jobs. I used to text on my cellphone but lost interest and stopped. As far as Twitter is concerned, I firmly believe that the root word of Twitter is “twit,” which pretty much sums up the intrisic value of most of the application’s content.

In short, I feel absolutely no social obligation or personal obsession to be “connected” at all times and refuse to be.

I found Nick Bilton’s remark very interesting when he said that particulary after Blogging for fourteen hours then three hours of Video games could be at rewarding activity. Last year in my mid fifties playing chess about five hours a day I achived a performace chess rating on the International Level. Though my rating rose
by nearly one thousand points, almost unheard of for a man my age. It was horrible my default option was to make a chess move on any computer and get up in the middle of the night to tend one of my 70 games. I walked away from it eleven months ago.Yeah my life is much better and I have it back, and our book is almost to our publisher.

Philip Kaveny

I think whether or not computer technology is a help or hinderance to us is dependent on many factors. In my case becoming computer saavy has helped me do my job better by leaps and bounds. I even ended up becoming a programmer and I didn’t use a computer until I was 21! I am not a universal techie; I don’t tweet and I don’t play games. I read hardcopy materials regularly and have a good attention span with no problem completing tasks or thoughts. I definitely prefer Google to searching catalogs of ISBN or the Dewey Decimal System at the library. Selecting good information no matter the format requires education and practice.

I love Internet, it’s a mobile library. It really makes me more informed and knowledgeable. Often times we introspect the influence on us of a new technology, which is a good thing. But we all have to remember, new technology offers us “new tools”, you can break things or build things, all up to “us”.

**** one of the commentators quotes research about laparoscopic surgery. However, that is a task specific benefit of video games regarding hand-eye coordination. Deep thought is important to decide IF surgery is appropriate. That point is lost. ****

Very good point. We can be very good at using our tools, as for using our tool to “design and plan” is another intelligence. Even if we possess intelligence, we will need to work harder on “wisdom”, which is equivalent to “deep thoughts”.

I have to say I definitely support “email”. No paper printing, no toxic ink, and you can delete them without creating landfill.

As for Facebook, why do so many people make it look like a “sin”? It really all depends on what kind of information you want to share and search on Facebook. For instance, the things we care about, we can get updated activity and information from Facebook. And I have made some friends with similar interest in Photography, music….etc, and we share out thoughts, what’s the difference than “pen pal”?

Frankly, with regard to Facebook, I have seen the amount of time people around me have wasted on Facebook as they communicate for hours on end volumes of inconsequentials to legions of fellow e-zombies. I thank the powers above that I am just enough of a misanthrope to have no interest at all in so-called “social networking.” Not when somewhere, anywhere, there is paint crying out to be watched as it dries.

What I don’t get about Facebook users is, they all have “hundreds” of virtual friends that one literally knows nothing about those “ghost” friends, and never had any interaction with each other and yet people keep accepting or sending invitations, why?

More and more surfing on the web, less and less personal interaction which allow us to have empathy for our fellow beings, human and otherwise. A story appears in the NY Times, about the rise in animal cruelty. There is also a story about the young male lacrosse player who killed his ex-girlfriend. Are they connect? Maybe. Interacting on a face to face basis forces us to interact with each other, listen, hopefully deeply, and do something which facebook and other sites don’t allow- guage emotional reactions on a near instantaneous basis in a continous feedback loop. This is what a relationship is all about and what makes us human. The other, = less so.

Might I add the absolute irony that the only way this discussion could happen is because of the internet? How else could so many different people from so many walks of life and some so common all find each other in this discussion with each other hosting opinions about something they heard online without the internet? Clearly the internet is not completely faulty. Before the internet, only “experts” were really allowed to say anything, now since the internet, anyone is allowed to say anything and given equal power in an anonymous forum and sometimes it shows just how little we know as experts or a common public. I don’t think the internet is doing anything except providing us a clearer image of ourselves and I think this holds true even when there is no internet there. We have to weigh statistics because before the age of the internet, literacy was a real problem, so the same percentage of illiterates I would bet are the same folks who are distracted now and this problem is all another new way of hailing the apocalypse before the problem is really understood.

[...] June 16, 2010 by Erik Marshall (emarsh) Nicholas Carr has been making the rounds with his new book, The Shallows, which started as an article in 2008 called “Is Google Making [...]

[...] some great examples of the Great Technology Debate, check out this NPR discussion and this episode of [...]

[...] OnPoint radio program referenced in today’s episode: http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/06/digital-tech-and-your-brai [...]

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