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Tara Houle's avatar

Great piece. I do believe our society has become so smart we truly are stupid. I don’t know of any world leader or society that has made their nation better because of technology. All I have seen is a more fractious society, with everyone screaming that they are right, and nobody knows how to engage in civil discourse, yet none are truly intelligent in any subject matter anymore because they truly do not have a firm foundation in any meaningful subject matter.

There is no golden age to reflect on, however part of being "civilized", is to adapt specific traits in order to progress forward in a meaningful manner. Those mores are now frowned upon as being old fashioned and no longer relevant, but this isn’t true. Young people have not benefited from not learning grace, poise, or the art of conversation and are wracked with anxiety because they don’t know basic maths to count back change when the power goes out. Who knew that basic skills such as baking and changing a tire would become obsolete in our highly structured world, yet these are the very skills we are now paying "experts" to teach our children. We do not have to live in a bygone era, but we shouldn’t forget all the wisdom that came before us.

As for your query about if younger people are still interested in reading and writing, as my youngest is finishing up on her Masters in Comparative Literature, I can assure you it is still very much needed for the younger generation. Interestingly it was technology which allowed her to watch the 1970s movie on "Wuthering Heights", but it was the 200 year old book which she fell in love with. And her friends who study Anthropology and Ancient Classics at university are equally enthralled. Technology is a blessing and a curse. Humans should use it as a tool to aid in our lives, but the encouragement of our leaders to allow Silicon Valley to continue to grow unchecked and allow the populace to become addicted to social media is just plain wrong. I just hope society wakes up and realizes that before it’s too late.

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English Champion's avatar

I've taught one of Nicholas Carr's articles about the cognitive offloading problem in my college classes ("Minds Like Sieves", 2011, https://www.roughtype.com/?p=1503) for a long time. It's definitely worth reading, and this was 14 yrs ago--obviously much worse now.

When we know material will always be accessible somewhere else, we quite literally don't pay attention enough to want to store it because we think we don't need to, and we will always just "look it up." But I tell my students this reminds me of when cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has said that assuming you can just “look up” whatever you need rather than remembering it is like someone handing you a thick Russian novel that is written in the original Russian. You might say, “But I don’t know Russian,” and the person could respond, “Here’s a Russian-English dictionary. Just look up the words.” This is not a very efficient way of reading. Life is much easier if you have a decent amount of background knowledge already stored in your brain.

So, what happens to us when EVERYTHING--all knowledge--is offloaded to a storage device/platform outside of our own brains? That's what we're facing now, and it's why students continue to get less intelligent.

Nice article.

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