google generation not so bright(article)

[TheAmazon]

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle4362950.ece


Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks
The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate



On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

The same thing happens if you talk on a mobile phone while driving – even legally with a hands-free kit. You listen to language on the phone and lose the ability to take in the language of road signs. Worst of all is if your caller describes something visual, a wallpaper pattern, a view. As you imagine this, your visual channel gets clogged and you start losing your sense of the road ahead. Distraction kills – you or others.

Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.

Meyer tells me that he sees part of his job as warning as many people as possible of the dangers of the distracted world we are creating. Other voices, particularly in America, have joined the chorus of dismay. Jackson’s book warns of a new Dark Age: “As our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger between man and machine.”

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation of teens, incapable of sustaining concentration long enough to read a book. And learning a poem by heart just strikes them as dumb.

In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us, noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”.

“The important thing,” he tells me, “is that we now go outside of ourselves to make all the connections that we used to make inside of ourselves.” The attending self is enfeebled as its functions are transferred to cyberspace.

“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist.

McKibben’s hero is Henry Thoreau, who, in the 19th century, cut himself off from the distractions of industrialising America to live in quiet contemplation by Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He was, says McKibben, “incredibly prescient”. McKibben can’t live that life, though. He must organise his global warming campaigns through the internet and suffer and react to the beeping pleading of the incoming e-mail.

“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the contemporary predicament in a nutshell.

[TheAmazon]

the fact that i have to frequently cut out words of articles to make them short enough for one post should attest to the fact that there is something wrong here...if you care to read the rest of the article it can be found at the link

times online(UK)

[johnny861]

i'd read it, but my attention span is a little too short...


actually, I read another article the other day, the technology is causing a serious attention/procrastination problem in the workplace... it's as bad as 1 out of 5 people who have issues with procrastination, ultimately costing the economy several billion a year in lost productivity...

[Chode_OhSnap]

Something about this article is screaming 'anti-tech'.
I don't think his opinion is any more valid than the "computers are our natural evolutionary step" talk by techophiliacs.

[TheAmazon]

If you..read the whole thing, i didn't get the impression that the author was "anti tech" or anything like that...like he said he had an iphone...but one can't overlook the ..things that are happening to our brains, the speed of technology is soooo much faster than anything the human brain has ever seen in the past...

..the neuroscientist could explain it better than i, but there is another article that basically describes that our brains are shaped..physically by our external stimuli...and the possible ramifications of such have not been fully explored...personally I don't see much benift from all this hyper connectivity..if anything people now seem more distant, alienated and dehumanized than before...or mabey that's just me growing older.


It's just if you've read any of the highlevel handouts put out by the various institutions involved in the little known field involving nano techonology, biology, computer technology all of this merging into the human...a borg type evolution...personally i don't want it..i don't want to be a machine. WE are at a very peculiar instant in history, an eon flux if one might say...

We as the human race should really take some time to pause..and see where all of this is going...and who is manipulating things behind the scenes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...scientist.html

[Alexis Gold]

Atlantic Monthly had a similar article. Cover reads "Is Google making us Stoopid?"

If you ever watched the movie the Lawnmover Man, there is a scene where the lawn mower man is actually listening to just sections of cds saying that is the best way to absorb info.

For ME, the internet/google has been able to bring so much more topics available to read about, even in snips. However, it will always be up to the person on how much they will dive into any topic. People like to be entertained & just knowing that (& this was in that documentary for the online generation) kids going to school now have to be taught in a way that holds their attention.

Kind of scary to see an entire generation growing up w/the need to be entertained instead of being able to entertain themselves.

[TheAmazon]

For me, i find with the internet i'm often in information overload...and then don't go to any websites...like at all, it's like i shut it all off, but then again I don't have a tv anymore, with the amount of websites out there for everything up under the sun ...you have to pick and choose what you let enter your brain. For example when that two peas one cup thing was all around the internet, i'm so glad i asked wtf it was before I clicked, ..i don't need to be desensitized any more.


tangent..i know...but , online discussion i guess.

and ditto on the kids growing up having to have a constant stream of entertainment...

I see the younger ones growing up and I think how far removed our realities are from each other ..(and not only because of the age difference)

[Alexis Gold]

Some of the info online is also either bullshit or half-ass.

[zerojunkie]

i don't know. I'm pretty ADD, and if something doesn't peak my interest then I don't have much patience for it. On the other hand, I can get lost for hours in something I like on Wikipedia. I've been that way since a long time before the internet. It just kinda sounds to me like they're using the internet as a scape goat for a problem that's always been there. The vast amount and ease of access of the information on the internet as opposed to the old way of getting that same information is more than enough to offset the 'problem' these guys think are caused by it...imo.

[Alexis Gold]

Well if something is not interesting to a person do not mean that the topic isn't important (or should be) to them.

Just saying that ppl are interested in rather unless information such as what celebs name their kids, a funny comedy site or unless video of the day rather than laws that are being passed that effects how they can raise their kids or what greedy politician is being voted into office.

[fish]

Originally Posted by Kitty B.I.C.

Kind of scary to see an entire generation growing up w/the need to be entertained instead of being able to entertain themselves.

Indeed. I often joked with the teacher that I worked with last year that we should shoot our lessons on video and then show them to the kids on TV. Same lesson, same room, same everything but just on TV instead of live. Pixels really mesmerize and entertain them.

[zerojunkie]

Originally Posted by Kitty B.I.C.

Well if something is not interesting to a person do not mean that the topic isn't important (or should be) to them.

Just saying that ppl are interested in rather unless information such as what celebs name their kids, a funny comedy site or unless video of the day rather than laws that are being passed that effects how they can raise their kids or what greedy politician is being voted into office.

Right, it should be, but it's not. If legislative processes were as important to them as Brittany's vag goblins then they'd pay more attention. The way we focus our attention on some things and not others is nothing new. The human brain just isn't wired to soak in information from 400 different things at once so it deals with that by skimming over things that don't peak the person's interests. If they had an internet devoted solely to someones life-long interests then I doubt there would be an issue.

[Alexis Gold]

Originally Posted by zerojunkie

Right, it should be, but it's not. If legislative processes were as important to them as Brittany's vag goblins then they'd pay more attention. The way we focus our attention on some things and not others is nothing new. The human brain just isn't wired to soak in information from 400 different things at once so it deals with that by skimming over things that don't peak the person's interests. If they had an internet devoted solely to someones life-long interests then I doubt there would be an issue.

People just pay attention to thinks that are easier for them to understand.

I seriously stop paying attention when my dad starts talking about exactly what goes on w/an oil rigs inner workings. I know he stop paying attention when I'm telling him the steps involved with media buying. Neither one of us are really going to ever use that info, but in a way - we could.

The actual legislative process is - b/c what happens when a law is trying to be passed to change it so that (what if) the Prez calls for Marital Law & then he will be the sole ruler of America? Yeah, if not many ppl even care about these things then the government can change around them effecting little things in daily life - such as having to all have chips implanted in my shoulder blades.

People can't let media (propaganda) make their choices instead of seeing past the hype & making their own choices.

The human brain can do a lot more than scientists can even measure.

If they had an internet devoted solely to someones life-long interests then I doubt there would be an issue.

I'm not sure what that means.

but hey, I really appreciate all forms of entertainment from tv watching to hardcore raving but I would be so sad if I really believed everything the media tried to spin to me as a fact. Actually I would also be crazy if I came up w/the idea that "everyone" is out to get me. Those conspiracy types drive me nuts as well.

[St. Stalin the Apathetic]

memory is measurably different today

for example, in Iceland periodically the people would gather for the reciting of the law. That meant there would people who would recite the entirety of Icelandic law as guidance for the gathering where disputes would be periodically resolved.

another: The illiad would be recited.... taking days.

harolds... messengers would be given oral messgaes to take from A to B and they had their minds trained to do so...

examples abound....

however, none of those bastards had to remember fucking PIN numbers for 5 different cards, 10 different login names, half a dozen passwords, etc etc etc etc.... or memory now is more diverse and segregated.... different

[zerojunkie]

Originally Posted by Kitty B.I.C.

I'm not sure what that means.

but hey, I really appreciate all forms of entertainment from tv watching to hardcore raving but I would be so sad if I really believed everything the media tried to spin to me as a fact. Actually I would also be crazy if I came up w/the idea that "everyone" is out to get me. Those conspiracy types drive me nuts as well.

It just means that if the internet was only filled with things that interested you and none of the junk email, celeb gossip articles you can't help but clicking cause it's like looking at a wreck on the side of the road, and ads...then you're attention wouldn't tend to waiver.