Well, Twitter does anyway. At least, it makes some people sound like they’re stupid, according to Bill Keller, executive editor at the New York Times.
As you might imagine, Bill’s tweet “#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss” a few days ago generated a lot of buzz on the web. Of course on Twitter, the conversations agreeing and disagreeing with the premise (and echoes of those conversations) were numerous and ongoing. (And many were, indeed, stupid, thus seeming to illustrate his point.) He followed up the tweet with an editorial this week in which he discusses in depth his impressions of Twitter specifically and social networking in general and the effect they have on user’s mental agility. The central theme of his article is that social networking is more or less killing genuine personal relationships and conversation; that Facebook friends aren’t really “friends” in the traditional sense. And that Twitter conversations are—by being fragmented into 140 character segments—are killing the ability of people to hold meaningful and deep conversations. He worries that the extensive and pervasive use of social networking is causing humanity to lose vital mental skills that we once had.
We’ve heard this argument before. We heard it about telephones in the early 1900’s; we heard it about radio in the mid-20th century; we heard it about television after that; and we’re hearing it about “texting” and the internet today. Mr. Keller also uses the example of the invention of the printing press as a catalyst for people losing the ability to remember vast quantities of information (a point taken from “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer). I find that assertion very strange, since the invention of writing by the Sumerians, the invention of paper by the Egyptians, and the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg are all usually cited as being responsible for an explosion of human knowledge not possible before.
But yet we still get the argument that technology shortens our attention spans and makes us dullards. Yes, I will grant you that communication modes and channels change as technology evolves. Technology may even change our attention spans and make us all a little bit ADHD (actually, I have a variation of that disease: ADOS—Attention Deficit…Oooh Shiny!). But does it mean that the people who use it are losing some innate mental capacity that we once had? I’ve written before about the role technology plays in the definition of “human-ness.” It certainly changes the way we interact with one another, it certainly changes social and group dynamics, it certainly changes the way we perceive the value of remembering infrequently-needed information. For instance: how many of you know the phone numbers for all of your friends, your children and your spouse (assuming you have one or all of those)? I certainly don’t. My phone does (as does my computer) so I don’t have to. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t make me any less intelligent than I was a few years ago; it simply means that I have additional memory capacity to remember other things. At least I hope it means that..I am getting older after all. Where was I. Oh yeah…
What do you think? One of the features of this blog that rarely gets used is the “comments” section below. I would very much like to solicit opinions of regular readers about social networking and mental capacity. Does using Facebook and Twitter make people stupid? If so, how; and if not, why not?
In the meantime, I’ll be under my desk. I think I just saw something shiny roll under there…
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