These articles with their grabbing titles first hook me, and then make me think. None of them are as dismissive of modern technology as their titles suggest. However, they are clearly not entirely positive on some of the impacts of technology on us as humans, especially on our children.
For some technologists, the articles are dismissed as fear-mongering. Read Write Web (RWW) had a post that did just that ("Twitter Leads to Immorality? C'mon"). One thing that jumps out at me is the difference in the single word immorality in the RWW title, versus amorality in the ScienceDaily title. Amorality is actually outside the sphere of morality (it is not moral or immoral). However, immorality is a lack of morals. There is a big difference.
Let me quote some of the RWW article, which itself includes quotes from the original work reported by ScienceDaily...
"According to first author Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, "for some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection." Unfortunately, in our "real-time" web of information flow, some things happen too fast for us to process. This leads to us never being able to fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states. "That would have implications for your morality," said Immordino-Yang. ...
Media scholar Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Anneberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC went on to further interpret the findings saying, "in a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in."
We can't help but feel we've heard similar strains of this same argument before. Doesn't it remind you of that old saying "TV will rot your brain?" Or maybe it's a throwback to the worrisome findings from the past decade about how violent video games supposedly lead to actual violence. ...
But is digital media really that bad? We think not. Maybe we can't properly feel the correct amount of compassion or pain when watching the Twitter stream update in TweetDeck, but is the Twitter stream really the place to go to experience these emotions anyway?"
The last sentence is indeed the question. At issue is the vast amount of time and attention that is paid to technological access of information, versus what is learned from person-to-person communication, self-reflection, deep reading, etc.I would describe the current digital environment as one full of “distractions”. You can (simultaneously) carry on 5 different IMs, listen to music with an earbud in one ear, watch/listen to TV (and change the channel incessantly), and be online on your computer. I have seen it done! So, how do people today learn empathy, and to deal with quiet, with frustration, with maintaining focus while doing boring, mundane work? More and more, I see people who cannot read and write English - they instead read and write IM TXT (shortened words, no capitalization, no punctuation, ...). That is hardly the best for conveying deep thoughts!
Many children today (including mine) do not want to be in a quiet space because it is boring. Many want external influences to soothe them. Reading is a last resort activity, when there is nothing “more interesting” to do. It takes too much time!
We have created a world of constant stimulation and immediate reward – which does not equip us to live in human time (versus computer time), to learn to understand ourselves and others, and to deal with other people as well as life’s boredom and frustrations.
As technologists, I argue that we have a responsibility to at least understand the impacts of technology, if not work to correct them!
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