December 30, 2011

Effects of Technology on Development in Society Part I

Posted in ASHLA Training at 10:52 PM by Riddle Nox

Ashla Article for January 2012

The Effects of Technology on Development in Society

Part I

The Current State of Development and Internet Usage

Thesis: They call kids the Digital Natives (Prensky 2001). We are at a stage in our societal development when we no longer have to rely on interpersonal 3^rd dimension communication in the workforce or even in consumer situations. People earn money over the Internet, and they buy pretty much anything they want from the Internet as well. This essay seeks to define where our society is in terms of being defined by this Digital Age, and I will talk about my opinion on where this is going to go in the future.

Not much emphasis is placed on history anymore. Our society is obsessed with innovation and forward thinking. Information is readily available at our fingertips, and the entire world is contained in a searchable database. Easy-to-find information creates a new way of thinking in the human mind. Once, people learned information and then needed to store it for a long period. Our brains were trained to remember vast quantities of information during our developmental years. As children, we learned mathematics, syntax, basic social procedure, and whatever else constitutes an Elementary education; yet, computers seem to be stopping that developmental part of long-term memory. I have often wondered if the storing of so much information online could be the decline of human thought; if the containing of life’s mystery on the web meant that we would not have to store it in our heads. That begs the thought of whether the human mind is a reservoir of “need”-based information or if it is a reservoir of “want”-based information. If we assume that the brain is “need”-based, then history is only something that needs to be documented, which can then be stored online. Therefore, the brain will have no need to recall it, and thus will not; however, the brain actually recalls everything you ever experience (sciencemuseum.org.uk). This is important, because it takes away the argument of “what a person can and cannot learn”. The brain learns everything.

So, why do we find ourselves increasingly dependent on the Internet for information? According to neurobiology, memories are stored according to importance, which is decided by the hippocampus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus). The information learned then goes through a process of repetition. There are two types of memory: episodic and semantic. Episodic memory is autobiographical in nature, and it is related to experiences and emotion. I am not focusing on this type of information because it is not particularly relevant to the discussion of “need”-based vs “want”-based information. Semantic information, though, is factual in nature and is the center for my argument (Shafy 2008). My most convincing argument for “need”-based memory is phone numbers. The brain does not need to recall these anymore (due to the advent of cell-phone number storage), so why should it? People only need to receive the number one time, store it in the phone, and then completely forget everything about it except for the name to which it is attached. I do, however, have a few numbers memorized. I can recall my mother’s cell-phone number, my father’s cell-phone number, and my house phone number. I learned these when I was young because the first cell-phone I had did not record numbers like the cell-phones of today do. A few weeks ago, though, I tried recalling my father’s cell-phone number and confused it with half of my mother’s cell-phone number. The semantic memory had begun to fade because I did not need it anymore. This sheds light on the argument of “need’ vs “want” based information. The brain IS need-based, but it is hierarchical. After a while, I could resolve the issue in my mind and remember the numbers clearly and separately.

This is the state of all things. Large abundances of factual information have become common luxury rather than necessary memory. We remember things in a present state, but over long term only recall things we need on a daily basis. Instead of knowing my mother’s cell-phone number, I know how to find it on my cell-phone. There is an equal amount of importance, but the latter takes precedence because of its daily pragmatism. As our generation (the Digital Natives) grows older, we do not use history on a daily basis. I do not use the things I learn in school on a daily basis, but I do use the techniques of learning that I acquired during my formative years daily. I cannot tell you what I learned in fourth grade, but I can tell you that I can recall the process I used to learn that information. It has not changed since then; I have similar learning strategies and similar dependencies. Technology is influencing the way we remember information not by changing the way we learn, but by restructuring our mind’s hierarchy of information storage (McKie 2011). This is what is changing. If you ask a teenager what George Washington’s birthday is, he/she may stare back at your blankly, but the moment you ask him/her to look up the date, they will have it for you in almost the same amount of time it would have taken them to recall the information in the first place. Memory has become a way of recalling information through a more reliable third party. This reaches into the very foundation of human need for power and “being right”. It really is a trust issue, not a social issue.

This is an excerpt from SherWeb blog, I thought it might be interesting to share here:

“Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.” (see http://blog.sherweb.com/how-the-internet-affects-your-brain/ for the whole article)

We cloister away from our old form of reading to a newer form as technology changes. I have read a lot online where surveys show that the percentage of teens that read has NOT changed since the advent of the Internet. I wondered: how could that be when literature has become scarcely a part of childhood and the Internet can change so much scarcity into easy-access information. I think the excerpt above states it the best: we are no longer a community of slow-moving, deep thinkers. We are the Digital Age. It is immediate, fast, and to-the-point information that makes good reading now. The Digital Age has altered the way we remember and the way we store ideas. It is not a question of “want”; it absolutely is a question of “need”. The Internet has changed society’s method of being productive. Back before computers, life was slower in the sense of information travel. People did not always find out things right when they happened. Sans telephone communication, the main constant source of news was only daily, and it was centered in the periodical genre.  Because of that, things did not “happen” as fast, if that makes any sense. People did not know who the president was until the morning after Election Day, if that! This is why there was so much emphasis on putting as much information into the daily events as possible. This is why the newspaper genre will fail as it is now. People are not as concerned with the deep meanings and intricacies of what happens in the world; they are interested in the events themselves as they happen. The brain is more efficient this way. Society’s “collective brain” shows that the Internet is changing how we perceive and therefore store information.

In terms of psychological development, the Internet is a beehive of social networking. The Internet has websites like Facebook that have changed the way people interact in the 3^rd dimension, sometimes referred to as “Real Life”, as if the cyber-world is merely a mirage. It is purely hypocritical, social networking. Data shows that teenagers use the Internet more and more for social interaction, and it is constantly the top percentage of reasons why people in general use the Internet (Affonso 1999). The same data ALSO shows, hypocritically, that young people have become socially recluse. Teenagers, averagely, interact less with their peers face-to-face when they have Facebook as an interface (Affonso 1999). At New York University, there was a sharp increase in drop-outs as computer integration also increased (Wallace 1999). They dropped out because they spent too much time addicted to the computer instead of their schoolwork. I wouldn’t want to be those kids when the parents got the results of THAT study.

These two views really encapsulate what the Internet has done to the Digital Native generation. Growing up in a world of fast-paced interaction, information is not stored the same way that it used to be stored. Children growing up intuitively in the Digital Age learn the same amount of material that their parental generation did; they simply learn different information. They learn how to find information on the web the same way they learned to recall information simply from their head when the Internet was not around. This slight shift in ideology can make all the difference, though. I will explore the actual repercussions of society’s adaptation to Internet communication in Part II of this essay.

Bibliography

Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1,” On the

Horizon 9.5. October 2001. (1–6).

Weblink:

          http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/WhoAmI/FindOutMore/Yourbrain/Whyisyourmemorysoimportant/Whereareyourmemories/Howdoyoucreatememories.aspx.

Shafy, S. “An Infinite Loop in the Brain”. Spiegal.de. November 2008.

          http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,591972,00.html.

McKie, R. “The Lost Art of Total Recall”. The Guardian. March 2011.

          http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/13/memory-techniques-joshua-foer.

Affonso, B. “Is the Internet Affecting the Social Skill of Our Children?”

Sierra Source. University of Nevada: December 1999.

          http://www.sierrasource.com/cep612/internet.html#23.

Wallace, A. The psychology of the Internet. New York:

Cambridge University Press. 1999.

Permalink