Even if earlier warnings about TV and radio were just instances of crying wolf, that doesn’t mean that this time there isn’t a wolf
Those of us who fret about the effects that digital technology is having on our brains are sometimes criticised along these lines: “Listen, you curmudgeonly Generation Xer, staring down the barrel of middle age, oldsters like you have always complained about new things corrupting civilisation! Socrates wished writing hadn’t been invented, because people wouldn’t remember things, making them shallower; the printing press was blamed for 16th-century information overload; in the 1930s, grouchy social critics thought radio was rotting teenage brains.” To which I cantankerously respond: why assume those warnings were wrong? To be clear, I’m not really against writing. But maybe life before it did feel vastly more profound and filled with awe? Maybe there was more wonder in the world before we started cluttering it with the printed word or broadcast media? We’ve only known life since these innovations, so there is no way we could tell.
Even if you’re not fully on board with my (tongue-in-cheek) Luddism on such matters, I hope you’ll admit there’s a morsel of a good point here: when it comes to understanding what tech is doing to our minds – what’s happening to our powers of concentration, for example – one major obstacle is that it’s already doing it. You’re looking at life using a brain that’s already been shaped by checking your smartphone 50 times a day – so if your attention doesn’t feel fragmented, that might just be because you can’t remember what it was like when it wasn’t. “We’ve pretty much lost all touch with any perceptual benchmarks against which we might judge how utterly our information technologies have enveloped our lives,” writes the philosopher and former Googler James Williams. “We get fragmentary glimpses of that old world from time to time: when we go camping, when we take a long flight without internet.” Mainly, it’s vanished.
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