A couple of years ago Duncan Reily made mention of Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech (link). Lessing came out with some interesting remarks about how the internet is fragmenting our culture and knowledge and because of this, as a society we are less intelligent.
While it may be easy to sit here, bash her and assume that her opinion no longer matters - I'm not going to. I think I see where Doris is coming from, she may just have poorly phrased her remarks. The internet is not making us dumb, it's the choices that we have (and make) on the internet that make us dumb.
Think about what is available on the internet. Endless amounts of news, scholarly articles, well written editorials and countless other sources of knowledge and intelligence. Having that information can't possibly make us dumb, can it?
What can make us dumb is our choice to spend more time on Facebook, Twitter or something as ridiculous as lolcats than on Google Scholar.
I'm not saying Doris should have come out and said what she did - but it may hold more weight than we'd all like to think.
Social Media ROI
14 years ago
I agree Facebook and the the like limit the time we actually spend learning, but also I think we experience an information overload. We look at least a dozen, if not infinitely more, websites a day which constantly update information. Which doesn't make us dumb, but it does make it lot harder to retain all the information we see.
ReplyDeleteFacebook and twitter don't always make us dumb. They make it easier to connect to other people. Besides helping people network, these networking sites allow people to post updates about a controversial article that just came out, or an update on a sports team. Anything is possible with the internet, and most of it is prevalent toward a growing, technological society.
ReplyDeleteI don't think facebook and twitter make us dumb, but I do believe that people need to think twice about what they post on the internet. We think that everything is private when in reality it is not and once it is on the web it is always out there, even when it is "deleted."
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