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  1. TopTop #1
    Shepherd's Avatar
    Shepherd
     

    Computers Stupify and Kill--Body and Soul

    Computers Stupify and Kill—Body and Soul

    The following article by columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. appeared in the June 14 mainstream daily Press Democrat, as well as elsewhere. It is based on the cover article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current Atlantic Monthly magazine. After recently returning to college teaching after an absence and seeing how sped-up and technologized our youth’s minds have become, my answer would affirmative. Too many of my colleagues have gotten enamored and addicted to computers and their convenience. “I am finding it increasingly difficult to read deeply.” Pitts admits. Atlantic Monthly writer Nicholas Carr, according to Pitts, wonders “if the Internet is not rewiring our very brains.”

    In “The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can be Saved,” 2003, award-winning author Todd Oppenheimer concludes as follows: “High technology is steering youngsters away from the messy fundamental challenges of the real world—and toward the hurried buzz and neat convenience of an unreal virtual world.”

    Do you know who owns the fastest computer? The U.S. military. They always have. The military developed computers. A primary purpose of computers is to kill people and advance the U.S. military’s domination of the world. We get a few crumbs. The military gets to target and execute with their high tech weaponry. The danger is that military commanders—like in China and Burma—can shut down our computer use, while continuing their own. This makes us vulnerable. Addict us to the tool; then control its use.

    Many young people have become dependent upon computers, especially for social life. People’s primary relationships used to be face-to-face, especially in neighborhoods and towns. With cell phones, laptops, My Space, and other gadgets people have machines between them and their friends, who are often far removed and sometimes never meet in person. As the peaks of oil, food, and water become more visible, the means to run those machines will become less available. At my Uncle Dale’s Iowa farm, where I visited in the late l940s, electricity had not arrived yet. Electricity did not make it to parts of the rural Mid-West until the early 1950s. We may not always have abundant electricity, which is based on non-renewable fossil fuels, the supplies of which are declining.

    The long history of criticism of technology would be worth reading at this historical moment. In 1923 the great U.S. economist Scott Nearing published “Oil and the Germs of War,” which is still available from the Good Life Center (goodlife.org). It is about World War I as being oil related. Nearing and his wife Helen wrote against technology for decades, until he died at 100 and she in her 90s. French sociologist Jacques Ellul, a resistance leader, wrote “The Technological Society.” German psychologist Erich Fromm left his homeland during the rise of fascism and distinguished between necrophilia (the love of machines) and biophilia (the love of life) in “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” and elsewhere. Among contemporary U.S. writers Jerry Mander’s “In the Absence of the Scared,” Chellis Glendinning’s “When Technology Wounds,” Neil Postman’s “Technopoly.” Matthew Stein’s “When Technology Fails,” and Theodore Roszak’s “The Cult of Information” are among the inspiring books challenging technology.

    Go ahead, you technophiles, defend your weapon.

    Shepherd, [email protected]

    P.S. I wrote this on a computer. I’m working to reduce my addiction. Now I’m going outside to pick fruit on my small farm.

    https://www.pressdemocrat.com/
    Is Google making us stupid? Maybe
    By Leonard Pitts Jr., Saturday, June 14, 2008

    I had thought it was just me.

    In reading the cover story in the new issue of The Atlantic, however, I have learned that I am not alone. There are at least two of us who have forgotten how to read.

    I do not mean that I have lost the ability to decode letters into words. I mean, rather, that I am finding it increasingly difficult to read deeply, to muster the focus and concentration necessary to wrestle any text longer than a paragraph or more intellectually demanding than a TV listing.

    You're talking to a fellow whose idea of fun has always been to retire to a quiet corner with a thick newspaper or a thicker book and disappear inside. But that has become progressively harder to do in recent years.

    More and more, I have to do my reading in short bursts; anything longer and I start drowsing over the page even though I'm not sleepy, or fidgeting about checking e-mail, visiting that favorite Web site, even though I checked the one and visited the other just minutes ago.

    I've tried to figure out why my concentration was shot, but no explanation satisfied: I watch less television than most folks and am no more busy than I was 10 years ago.

    Now, author Nicholas Carr posits a new theory. In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" he notes that he and many of his literary friends report the same experience, leading him to wonder if the Internet is not rewiring our very brains, not altering the hard drive of the human computer.

    The culture of hyperlinks, blogs and search engines that return more results than you could read in a lifetime is, he argues, changing the way we read and, indeed, think.

    You hardly need me to sell you on the benefits of the Internet.

    Sitting at her desk, the average human being now has instant access to a vast universe of information a previous generation could not have begun to dream.

    But what if the very vastness of that universe, the very fact of so much out there to know and so little time to know it in, requires a tradeoff in concentration and focus?

    I mean, we may have more options than ever before, but we're still dealing with the same 24 hour days we've always had. And the Internet does little to filter or prioritize the information it retrieves -- it simply dumps it on your head and leaves it to you to figure out.

    So perhaps it is to be expected that we learn to skim and scan information, but lose the ability to truly absorb and analyze it.

    Granted, this is all theory. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet subjected it to scientific rigor. But it is compelling, nevertheless.

    A couple of weeks ago, I read Scott McClellan's book, "What Happened," for this column. Deadlines being what they are, I had to wolf down the last 200 pages in a single day. I chose an uncomfortable chair to minimize the danger of dozing off, allowed myself only one Internet break.

    I would read this book. Nothing else. Just read.

    It was difficult. I felt like I was getting away with something, like when you slip out of the office to catch a matinee.

    Indeed, I'd have felt less guilty sitting in a matinee. I had to keep reminding myself that this was OK, that, indeed, this was work.

    It wasn't until somewhere around the third hour that I began to unclench, to stop feeling guilty for spending so much time focused on this one bit of matter plucked from a surging sea of knowledge. It felt . . . liberating.

    In an era in which everyone has a truth and the means to fling it around the world, an era in which knowledge is increasingly broad but seldom deep, maybe that's the ultimate act of sedition: to pick up a single book and read it.

    The hours I spent reading McClellan's book felt like an escape, like I had stepped off a treadmill for the first time in years. The pages fell away and the hours got lost.

    I don't know about you, but I could use more days like that.

    Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. E-mail him at [email protected].

    Copyright © 2008 PressDemocrat.com — All rights reserved.
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  2. TopTop #2
    MsTerry
     

    Re: Computers Stupify and Kill--Body and Soul

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Shepherd: View Post
    The hours I spent reading McClellan's book felt like an escape, like I had stepped off a treadmill for the first time in years. The pages fell away and the hours got lost.
    I'll be one of the last to say that computers are a healthy medium, but they are a social phenomena, more so than reading a book, which is essentially solitary and anti-social behavior.
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  3. TopTop #3
    Lenny
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    Re: Computers Stupify and Kill--Body and Soul

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by MsTerry: View Post
    I'll be one of the last to say that computers are a healthy medium, but they are a social phenomena, more so than reading a book, which is essentially solitary and anti-social behavior.
    What about watching a movie in a theater? Or opera?
    One sits with others, experiences the same phenomena and usually doesn't discuss the issue, unless blah, blah with their significant other. Does that make the other folks in the theater less social?

    I just reread what I wrote. You know, I am not thinking straight, or at least writing straight today. Or is it just today? No, wait, Ms, you need not answer that one.
    Anyway, reading can be antisocial, or a monologue with a friend, depending on the material.
    Never mind.
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