It’s not technology’s fault
Steven Pinker, renowned popular linguist and professor of psychology at Harvard, has set up a straw man. In an op-ed from todays NYT, Pinker speaks against fear-mongers who prophesy that technology will be the downfall of civilization. The oft-repeated concept is that technology, while it makes information access faster, is training the human mind to find pithy answers with no attention span.
Pinker’s assessment that “such panics often fail basic reality checks” is valid—the Internet is not rotting our minds, per se. Still, I think he has set up a ridiculous straw man, thus entirely missing the point.
One commenter on a Boing Boing post about Pinker’s article, Christovir, points out that resistance to change has characterized every major advance in technology: widely-readable expressions of the Bible, printing, the phone. (Comment #7) And in every case, the general populace has been in no way harmed by these advances; to the contrary, we call them “advances” for a reason.
In his article, Pinker mentions that science, for example, would be totally shot if technology were harmful to human thought. Since science is doing better than ever, he concludes, technology must not be harmful to human thought.
That’s true.
Here’s where Pinker goes wrong. I agree, doomsday speech about the Internet being the precursor to pandemonium is total bunk. But that’s not the point—we all know those ideas are a little extreme. But it’s totally sensible to argue that the easing of quick access to information on a screen is developing a culture of shortened information seeking behavior.
Savolainen discusses the concept of an “information source horizon”. (article, behind a pay wall) Basically, people have a mental map of where they can get information, in some order by preference. When they actually try to answer a need they have, they take preferential courses through this horizon—”information pathways”, in Savolainen’s terms—sequentially resorting to less and less preferred sources as they must. Often, people will stop short of an answer if it requires them to go too far down a pathway. (Props to Carolyn Hank, such an awesome instructor that I actually remember these things.)
As the effective distance between us and some satisfactory amount of information shortens—one way you could define advances in technology—we become more and more resistant to spending high amounts of effort on intellectual pursuit. Put another way in example, if I can find a blog post through Google giving me enough easy information on something that I’m happy, I won’t even consider going to a print collection in a physical library.
Of course, Pinker’s science example stands, mainly because to get the necessary information for such high academic pursuit, one must go really far down an information pathway. The problem is, almost no information needs, across the whole scope of humanity, are that demanding.
Technology is in no way hampering human intellect, but Pinker is wrong to completely dismiss claims that technology is affecting how far people are willing to go to satisfy information needs.
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EDIT: I forgot to mention that Pinker does say more in his op-ed, though nothing to directly inform my points. I’d encourage you to read it in full—he’s not wrong; I just think he’s overlooking real issues.
tl;dr
Well, no one said you had to. ;-P
Most people who make public statements have never been able to separate rationale discussion from strong emotion. That’s the oft-missed message behind the book “State of Fear.” People either predict complete doom or completely dismiss something.
It’s manipulative and insulting. There are plenty of normal people in the US who are perfectly capable of understanding that something doesn’t have to destroy the world to be important.
However, the “drama disease” is what is covered by the press.
An annoying thought, but a good article, dsubsilentio!