AP Synthesis Question: Technological Communication and Community
Dr. Gingrich
Introduction:
Today everyone uses technology non-stop in their daily lives from ipods to HD tv from video games to facebook. Technology permeates our lives and many of us would be helpless without it. Researchers have argued that this use of technology has a detrimental effect on our existence; others have argued that we have entered a new era of global thinking and an expanding international community through the use of technology.
Assignment:
Read the following sources (including any introductory information) carefully. Then in an essay that synthesizes at least three of the sources listed and uses at least three additional sources for support, take a position that defends, challenges, or qualifies the claim that technological communication has a positive effect on human life. The essay should be a minimum of 1250 words, typed, double-spaced and include a works cited and appropriate in text citations. Each of your sources (six) should be directly quoted at least once in the essay.
Rough Draft Due: Friday, September 3rd
2nd Draft Due: Friday, September 10th
Source A (Johnson)
Source B (Stoll)
Source C (Time Magazine)
Source D (Cartoon)
Source E (“Four Families Suing Myspace”)
Source F (Boyd)
Source H (Harding)
Source I (Nakashima)
Source J (“Years ago…)
Source K (Wright)
Source L (Silvers)
Source M (Pinker)
Source N (Blow)
Source A
Johnson, Jason. “The
Case for Social Networks.” Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk
Blog. January
25, 2006. http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com
Teen blogs are not about the technology – they are about feelings of belonging and being loved. They are about trying on different personalities. They are about someone who feels isolated connecting with others who share their interests or insecurities. They are about all the same things that have existed for hundreds of years, hidden in notebooks and scribbled on bathroom walls and whispered over telephones. The content of MySpace.com bears discussion, not obstruction. It is where some schools and parents are looking to better understand and aid their children and students. Our dialogue should teach them to use the site effectively and about what they can hope to accomplish with it. As the National Research Council report on protecting children from internet pornography analogized: “Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. All of these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one's children is to teach them to swim.” We all need to be training more swimmers.
Source B
Stoll, Clifford. “Computers Will Not Significantly Transform Society.” Computers and Society. Paul A. Winters, Ed. Current Controversies Series. Greenhaven Press, 1997.
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning technoburble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where--in the holy names of Education and Progress--important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
Source C
“Person of the Year: You.” December, 25 2006. Time Magazine Web Version. <http://www.time.com>
(Time.com
)
-- The "Great Man" theory of hisstory is usually attributed to the Scottish
philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the
biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the
famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious
beating this year.
To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the bomb, and the president of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos -- those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms -- than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
America loves its solitary geniuses -- its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses -- but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Source D
“On the
Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
The New Yorker
Source E
“Four Families suing Myspace overe assaults: Parents claim daughters were sexually abused by adults met on site. January 18, 2007. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16688909/?GT1=8921
NEW YORK - Four families have sued News Corp. and iits MySpace social-networking site after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site, lawyers for the families said Thursday.
The law firms, Barry & Loewy LLP of Austin, Texas, and Arnold & Itkin LLP of Houston, said families from New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina filed separate suits Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation by the companies.
“In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users,” said Jason A. Itkin, an Arnold & Itkin lawyer.
The families are seeking monetary damages "in the millions of dollars," Itkin said.
"Hopefully these lawsuits can spur MySpace into action and prevent this from happening to another child somewhere," he said.
Critics including parents, school officials and police have been increasingly warning of online predators at sites like MySpace, where youth-oriented visitors are encouraged to expand their circles of friends using free messaging tools and personal profile pages.
MySpace has responded with added educational efforts and partnerships with law enforcement. The company has also placed restrictions on how adults may contact younger users on MySpace, while developing technologies such as one announced Wednesday to let parents see some aspects of their child’s online profile, including the stated age. That tool is expected this summer.
Source F
Boyd,
Danah. “Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart
MySpace.” American Association for the Advancement of
Science.
The dynamics of identity production play out visibly on MySpace. Profiles are digital bodies, public displays of identity where people can explore impression management. Because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being, profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media. Explicit reactions to their online presence offers valuable feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation. Of course, because imagery can be staged, it is often difficult to tell if photos are a representation of behaviors or a re-presentation of them.
For those seeking attention, writing comments and being visible on popular people's pages is very important and this can be a motivation to comment on others' profiles. Of course, profile owners have the ability to reject comments and Tom rejects most of them. Some people literally spam their network with comments. Last week, there were "Valentine's cards" that people made and added to the profiles of all of their friends via comments. People advertise events through mass comments. Some comments are also meant to be passed on, creating virus like memes.
While these dynamics may not seem particularly important, they are essential to youth because they are rooted in the ways in which youth jockey for social status and deal with popularity. Adults often dismiss the significance of popularity dynamics because, looking back, it seems unimportant. Yet, it is how we all learned the rules of social life, how we learned about status, respect, gossip and trust. Status games teach us this.
Source H
Harding, Anne. Video Game Playing May Fulfill Innate Human Need. Motivation and Emotion, December 2006.
Playing video games can satisfy deep psychological needs and, at least in the short term, improve people's well-being, new research shows.
The more a game fulfilled a player's sense of independence, achievement and connectedness to others, the more likely he or she was to keep playing, Dr. Scott Rigby of Immersyve, a Florida-based virtual environment think tank, and colleagues from the University of Rochester in New York found. And the more fully a player's needs were satisfied, the better he felt after playing.
"We think this is really one of the first validated models of what is going on psychologically when people are playing video games," Rigby told Reuters Health in an interview. To date, he noted, research on video games has focused on their potentially harmful effects, such as promoting social isolation, addiction, and violence.
While the findings don't prove that "video games are always good for you," Rigby noted, they do help to provide a more balanced understanding of people's motivations for playing them. "We're trying to in some sense normalize how people look at video games, rather than seeing them as having some mystical power to addict."
In four studies reported in the journal Motivation and Emotion, Rigby and his colleagues sought to understand people's motivation for playing the games and the games' immediate effect on well-being.
In the first study, they had 89 people play a simple game involving jumping to different platforms. In the second phase, the researchers compared the experience of 50 people who played two 3-D adventure games, one very popular and one less so. In the third study, 58 people tried four different games, while in the fourth the researchers surveyed 730 members of an online gaming community who were experienced in playing "massively multiplayer online" games.
Players' enjoyment of games depended on whether the games made them feel competent and independent, and, in the case of multiplayer games, connected to other players. Players who enjoyed their experience showed increases in well-being, self-esteem, and vitality after playing, while those whose needs weren't satisfied reported lowered vitality and mood.
"Video games we think have tremendous potential to impact people, particularly today's video games which are incredibly rich and complex," Rigby said. "This creates very fertile ground psychologically."
Mastering challenges in video games can be a healthy way of coping when opportunities for feeling independent or competent are scarce in the real world, he argued.
"Video games in some ways are very good at satisfying these psychological needs," Rigby noted. "Often times real life is not as clear...real life often can make you feel ineffective."
Source I
Nakashima, Ellen. “Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web: Law Students Feel Lasting Effects of Anonymous Attacks.” Washington Post, March 7, 2007.
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.
Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.
The woman and two others interviewed by The Washington Post learned from friends that they were the subject of derogatory chats on a widely read message board on AutoAdmit, run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent. The women spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution online.
The law-school board, one of several message boards on AutoAdmit, bills itself as "the most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world." It contains many useful insights on schools and firms. But there are also hundreds of chats posted by anonymous users that feature derisive statements about women, gays, blacks, Asians and Jews. In scores of messages, the users disparage individuals by name or other personally identifying information. Some of the messages included false claims about sexual activity and diseases. To the targets' dismay, the comments bubble up through the Internet into the public domain via Google's powerful search engine.
The site's founder, Jarret Cohen, the insurance agent, said the site merely provides a forum for free speech. "I want it to be a place where people can express themselves freely, just as if they were to go to a town square and say whatever brilliant or foolish thoughts they have," Cohen said.
The students' tales reflect the pitfalls of popular social-networking sites and highlight how social and technological changes lead to new clashes between free speech and privacy. The chats are also a window into the character of a segment of students at leading law schools. Penn officials said they have known about the site and the complaints for two years but have no legal grounds to act against it. The site is not operated with school resources.
Source J
Carlson, D. “Years Ago You’d Come Back to Work After Vacation to Find A Huge Stack of Paperwork.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 14, 2006.
Source K
Wright, Robin. E-mail and Prozac. New York Times Editorial, April 17, 2007.
I have a theory: the more e-mail there is, the more Prozac there will be, and the more Prozac there is, the more e-mail there will be. Maybe I should explain.
Twenty millenniums ago, communication was simple. Utterances were usefully accompanied by nonverbal cues: tone of voice, facial expression, nudging your fellow hunter-gatherer in the ribs upon reaching a punch line.
Twenty years ago, communication was still pretty simple. Much of it was by phone — no nudging, true, but intonation could help distinguish, say, wry irony from bitter resentment. Plus, when you asked a question, the answer came in seconds, as opposed to minutes, hours, or never.
Don’t get me wrong. E-mail is great. It has vastly expanded my social horizons. Twenty years ago I rarely spoke by phone to more than five people in a day. Now I often send e-mail to dozens of people a day. I have so many friends!
Um, can you remind me of their names? Of course, it works both ways. My many e-mail “friends” also have many “friends,” and I’m just one of them. So they can’t afford to treat me like a friend — you know, reliably acknowledging my existence, that sort of thing.
So questions arise. Is Joe — who once answered e-mail promptly but has fallen silent — mad at me? Or has my social status, in Joe’s view, dropped a bit, so I’m not quite worth his time? And if the latter: Who the hell does Joe think he is?
There are two cures for this condition: (1) Chanting, “It’s the spam filter.” (2) Prozac (or one of its rivals).
Serotonin, the neurochemical Prozac boosts, was shaped by natural selection to help us handle social hierarchy. Respect and other forms of positive feedback elevate serotonin, raising self-esteem and leading to the sort of self-assured conduct that befits a high-status primate. Disrespect and criticism can lower serotonin, leaving us open to self-doubt.
Self-doubt can be valuable when it’s reality-based — if, say, Joe is really mad at you, and self-doubt leads you to wonder why and then make amends. So the serotonin gyroscope was a useful thing in the environment natural selection designed it for: the hunter-gatherer landscape of clear communication.
But the landscape of e-mail is full of noise and imagined signals. Serotonin can gyrate dysfunctionally.
Hence the Prozac temptation: Just open that serotonin throttle and cruise through your in-box, unhampered by fancied slights, groundless anxieties and other impediments to bliss. (Your mileage may vary.) And, bliss aside: Imagine the efficiency! With the time you don’t spend worrying about Joe, you can crank out e-mail to Jim, Sally and Sue. And efficiency is what e-mail is about, right? By ending the need to coordinate schedules, it lets us interact with lots of people — and interact along such narrow channels that we skip the bother of getting to know an entire human being.
It’s an old story. Technological change makes society more efficient and less personal. We know more people more shallowly. The sociologist David Riesman’s 1950 book about his era’s part in this process was called “The Lonely Crowd.”
To be sure, there are lots of to-be-sures I should throw into a column this full of blithe generalization, speculative fancy and jokey hyperbole. For example: Prozac is a serious drug, not to be taken lightly. Also: however much time people spend networking shallowly, they can find places for deeper contact. Some parts of the Internet foster that, and e-mail can enrich it.
But that gets at the one point I’m not joking about.
The reason we’ve always carved out a place for deep human contact is because we deeply need it. Some contours of the mind are so firm they lead us to selectively defy the imperative of growing efficiency. Ultimately, technological evolution has had to accommodate human nature.
Until now. Now we enter the age of pharmacology and approach the age of genetic engineering. We can, in effect, change human nature to accommodate technological evolution. If the deft use of e-mail makes each of us more successful, we may, one by one, amend the structure of our selves until we are the optimal e-mail animals. And so, too, with the next empowering information technology: bend us, shape us, anyway it wants us.
If we’re indeed already entering this era, I can’t say I’m especially enjoying it. Then again, I haven’t tried Prozac. Yet.
Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv.
Source L
Monday, Jun 14, 2010 21:02 ET
Salon.org
By Emma Silvers
·
Salon/iStockphoto
Love it or hate it, Facebook is now the undisputed king of online socializing. Since its inception in 2004 as a Harvard University-based social experiment, the website has recruited 500 million users in 95 countries -- and in doing so, fundamentally changed the way friends, casual acquaintances and sometimes total strangers interact with one another. For the younger generations, it's becoming hard to remember a time before wall posting, Facebook event RSVP-ing and photo tagging were part of our everyday lexicon, and even for the rest of us, its become a major center for news consumption and social activism -- from advocating same-sex marriage to Betty White's "Saturday Night Live" gig -- and got us to stay in touch with our high school friends, whether we wanted to or not.
But things have gotten a little rocky for the 6-year-old company in recent weeks, when changes in its privacy settings caused outrage among users, talk of a "Facebook exodus," and, finally, backpedaling by the company's 26-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The incident raised prickly questions about how the social network is changing the modern view of privacy -- one of the many that David Kirkpatrick, the former senior editor for Internet and technology for Fortune magazine, explores in his new book, "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World." With unprecedented access to Facebook's creators and headquarters, Kirkpatrick tells the story of the company's rise from collegiate project to cultural phenomenon.
Salon spoke to Kirkpatrick about the company's privacy scandals, the keys to its success, and the reasons most of us probably won't be leaving Facebook any time soon.
Why is the story of Facebook important?
Facebook grew so big so fast, and people got used to using it so quickly, that a lot of them haven't stepped back and given much thought to how it's different from what came before, and that's something I hope my book will do -- give perspective. It's extremely powerful technology and, frankly, we should all understand how it works.
Facebook is known for having a tightly run P.R. machine, and in this book you seem to have bypassed it completely.
I think Mark Zuckerberg knew I was somebody who was convinced it was an important phenomenon, and he knew it needed to be explained a lot better than he was capable of explaining it. Also, Facebook was founded on his own belief in a growing transparency that he thought was going to envelop all of modern life, and he really does believe in transparency, so he didn't think there was anything wrong with the full story of Facebook coming out. They had no right of approval on this. I like to say it was authorized, but not approved. They gave me access, but they asked for nothing in return, and I think there are very few companies that would give me that kind of access and not ask to see anything before it comes out.
In the earlier sections of the book, you go into the evolution of online social networking -- the history of websites like Friendster and MySpace. Why does Facebook seem to just keep growing while other sites have either had really modest success, by comparison, or failed completely?
I think it was a confluence of things. Starting it at Harvard was a big factor: Because [Zuckerberg] was at a university, he was able to create a system based on genuine identity, that was authenticated with the university-issued e-mail address that each student had. They could make an ironclad identification between the e-mail holder and the name in the profile, and that created a culture from Day One that was based on using your real name and being who you really were on the server. That was something none of the predecessors had been successful at -- Friendster tried to have real names but it was thwarted, MySpace didn't even really try. The concept of real identity became central to how Facebook worked -- knowing that your friends are the people they say they are.
Another important factor was digital photography, which was taking off just around the time Facebook launched. More people were starting to have cellphones they took pictures with, and Facebook really took advantage of that with the photo application. At the same time, broadband Internet had just started to penetrate more American households. I also think Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty uniquely visionary leader, and he made a lot of really good calls over the years as the service encountered problems. And some of it is luck. It's design, it's smarts, but it's a lot of luck.
You quote a former engineer at one point as saying that Zuckerberg just "doesn't believe in privacy." In the wake of the recent privacy scandal, do you think that's true?
What we've seen lately isn't even outrage from users -- it's a reasonable pushback from the experts, like journalists, privacy advocates, government officials asking about the implications of some very complicated changes Facebook was initiating that would lead to its features and functionality being available across the Internet. I think Mark did begin to recognize that those complaints were largely justified, and that he had to take them seriously and redesign the privacy settings.
Does he believe in privacy? I think the answer's yes -- he believes that people have the right to keep control of where their data flows on the Internet, and I think he would argue that Facebook was the very first major service that really gave you control over that. As opposed to Google, which basically has the attitude that they will observe you without your knowledge, and sell data about you to their advertisers. With Facebook, it's a blank slate -- you decide what information goes where, and I think there's no place else you would have that confidence. I think that raised expectations that Facebook would keep their standards extremely high for how that data was handled.
I do think Zuckerberg has made some big mistakes in the past. The Beacon episode [in which an advertising tool broadcasted information about its users' activity on other websites] was one instance where they clearly did not design a service properly, and it really did exploit and abuse information about individuals and they had to ultimately turn that off entirely. Even he, today, admits they totally screwed up on Beacon.
But he also thinks fewer and fewer people are really going to want or need the new privacy controls.
I think Mark believes we are entering a world where we are all becoming more and more comfortable with information about us being disclosed. Scott McNealy [co-founder of Sun Microsystems] said 10 years ago, "You have no privacy, get over it." I don't think it's necessarily a good thing, but it's almost inarguable because of the nature of a marketing-led society, the nature of consumerism, the nature of the Internet.
Look, Facebook has photos, and a lot of people can see them, but you can put protections on them. Whereas you could take a picture of me walking down the street, and put it on Flickr and put my name on it, and it would show up in a Google search of me and there would be nothing I could do about it, There are cameras pointing at us everywhere we go in modern life. Google has Street View, and they drive a truck down the street and they take a picture of your house and they don't ask your permission. This is the world we live in, and information is getting out, period, end of story. Mark observed that long ago, and he's been designing Facebook for that world all along.
There was a lot of hype about "Quit Facebook Day," when all these people pledged to cancel their accounts on May 31 of this year, and not very many people actually wound up quitting. Do you think a mass Facebook exodus is even possible at this point?
I do think people could leave Facebook en masse. They could screw up on privacy enough, or the government could force them to do things that are awkward enough that it becomes a pain in the neck to use, and people just leave -- that's the nature of the Internet. But for the moment, most of what you do on Facebook can't really be replicated anywhere else, and the network effect -- the more people that are on there, the more people want to be on there -- acts as this sort of intrinsic sort of glue holding the thing together.
Then there's a switching cost: Once you've established this whole network of friends and put data and photos up there, to reassemble that elsewhere is a heck of a lot of work. So even if there were another platform that came along that enabled you to do that, I don't think it's something most people would want to do. I see Facebook remaining the colossus of social networking for the foreseeable future.
Having spent so much time in the company headquarters, what surprised you the most?
I didn't know how many older people had come and gone over the company's history. Particularly in 2005 and 2006, there was a revolving door of experienced technology executives coming in and staying for six or nine months, and then getting fed up because they thought Mark Zuckerberg wasn't focusing enough on making a profit, or they didn't like the culture, or it became obvious that they weren't going to ever get to run the company. There's a really intellectual, capable group of leaders there, and they share the same values. Profit has really never been the primary goal of the people building the product at Facebook.
You emphasize in the book that Facebook has a wide range of uses. It can be used to create everything from Darfur protests to "If this group reaches 100,000 people my boyfriend will quit World of Warcraft." Do you think Facebook is a force for good?
On balance, I have to say my view of Facebook is as a positive force in modern life. I think it's a new form of communication, of exchanging information, and that leads to good stuff. It certainly has allowed people to organize politically more efficiently, and I think over time Facebook and other similar tools will change the nature of politics and democracy.
I think we're just seeing the beginning stages of that. If you are upset about something anywhere in the world today and you want to protest it Facebook is likely the first place you're going to go, because it lets you aggregate a bunch of people who agree with you faster than any other means -- and that's whether you're protesting a new parking lot in a small town in New Zealand, or the government repression of election results in Iran. Or showing your support for Sarah Palin -- who's the second most popular politician on Facebook after Barack Obama, and a master user of Facebook. I think it's a tool that helps people connect with other people, and that is almost inevitably a good thing. To that degree, I'm a believer.
What do you know about the company's plans for the future?
They've been pretty explicit that their goal is to become infrastructure that lives across the Internet, where you maintain your identity and make every Internet experience social, where you bring your friends with you everywhere you go -- both on the Internet and on our mobile devices -- whether you're making commercial transactions, consuming media, expressing opinion, or just walking down the street. Facebook sees itself as being in the position as a company to facilitate the socialization of all modern experience. It sounds grandiose, but I think that's where they see themselves headed.
New York Times
June 10, 2010
Mind Over Mass Media
By STEVEN PINKER
Truro, Mass.
NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.
So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.
But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.
For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing, as anyone who has lost a morning of work to the Web site Arts & Letters Daily can attest.
Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.
Experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain. Speed-reading programs have long claimed to do just that, but the verdict was rendered by Woody Allen after he read “War and Peace” in one sitting: “It was about Russia.” Genuine multitasking, too, has been exposed as a myth, not just by laboratory studies but by the familiar sight of an S.U.V. undulating between lanes as the driver cuts deals on his cellphone.
Moreover, as the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show in their new book “The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else. Music doesn’t make you better at math, conjugating Latin doesn’t make you more logical, brain-training games don’t make you smarter. Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.
The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.
Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.
And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “The Stuff of Thought.”
June 11, 2010
Friends, Neighbors and Facebook
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Mister Rogers would be so disappointed in me.
Aside from the people who live in my building, I know the name of only one person who lives on my block: Roger Cohen, a Times colleague.
I want to blame it on the fact that I’m absolutely awful with names and can be quite socially awkward. But that has ever been thus. Then I thought that maybe it was a city thing, but that explanation goes but so far. I’m actually beginning to believe that it’s bigger than me, bigger than my block, bigger than this city. I increasingly believe that less neighborliness is becoming intrinsic to the modern American experience — a most unfortunate development.
A report issued Wednesday by the Pew Research Center found that only 43 percent of Americans know all or most of their neighbors by name. Twenty-nine percent know only some, and 28 percent know none. (Oh, my God! When Roger dashes off to London this summer, I’ll become a “none.”)
Yet I have thousands of “friends” and “followers” on the social-networking sites in which I vigorously participate. (In real life, I maintain a circle of friends so small that I could barely arrange a circle.) Something is wrong with this picture.
I am by no means a woe-is-us, sky-is-falling, evil-is-the-Internet type. In fact, I think that a free flow of information has led to greater civic engagement. Yippee! However, I am very much aware that social networks are rewiring our relationships and that our keyboard communities are affecting the attachments in our actual ones.
For instance, a Pew report issued in November 2009 and entitled “Social Isolation and New Technology” found that “users of social networking services are 26 percent less likely to use their neighbors as a source of companionship.”
And a May study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that “college kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago.” The reason? One factor could be social networking. As one researcher put it, “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline.”
Furthermore, an article in The New York Times on Thursday laid out new research that revealed that “feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread” among children of parents who obsess over cellphones, instant messaging and Twitter at the expense of familial engagement.
There’s no need to pine for a return to the pre-Facebook, cardigan-swaddled idealism of Mister Rogers and his charming “neighbors” and “friends,” but it is important for us to remember that tangible, meaningful engagement with those around us builds better selves and stronger communities. I should post that on Twitter.
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I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: