Checking out the emperor

Some related links:

Research connects lower grades to Facebook use:

Ohio State University Research News: "Study finds link between Facebook use, lower grades in college"

Time Magazine: "What Facebook Users Share: Lower Grades"

Frontline had a segment on a recent program on the impact of the intensive super-connected technology culture in South Korea. The program included a visit to a "digital detox" center for teenagers. I was reminded of the quote from a 5th-grader, courtesy of William Louv: "I like to play indoors 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are." The de-tox program included pitching tents and jumping rope (not sure what the exact context of the activities were, but notably they required being outdoors). That "digital addiction" is a manifestion of nature deficit disorder, and part of the remedy, as Louv writes, is "leave no child inside."


And a related post I made for a class last Fall:

Steve Talbott has written for many years about the dangers of our fascination with, and near worship of, technology. A former technology writer, he wrote The Future Does Not Compute in 1995, and released a collection of essays titled Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in the Age of Machines in 2007. Both books were published by O'Reilly, the respected and prolific publisher of a wide range of technical computer books. The subtitle of the latter book pretty much sums up Talbott's view of technology -- we are challenged to continually remind ourselves that we are not machines, and that computers are machines. "Artificial life" and "virtual reality" are fundamentally different from "real life" and umm real reality. Computers can do remarkable things, but thinking, Talbott argues, is a uniquely human activity (all of the AI research and theorizing notwithstanding). Talbott warns us that we endanger ourselves when we begin to think the way computers work -- reducing the world to quantitative, digital approximations, and then seeing and treating the world as a machine, instead of appreciating its wonderful qualitative, analog complexities.

As a working technologist, I have found Talbott's writing to be inspiring in terms of what it means to be a human being (and not a machine), and deeply helpful in reminding me not to be too swept away by the machines we have created -- to keep technology in its proper perspective. Much of Talbott's writings are available online at http://netfuture.org/. He also has an online newsletter (found at that site), called NetFuture: Technology and Human Responsibility which comes out irregularly. To subscribe to the newsletter, go to http://netfuture.org/subscribe.html.

And finally, I am reading Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind (2004). (The subtitle I think sums up his general theme: "Saving education from the false promise of technology".) From the introduction: "One could ... say that in the realm of education, technology is like a vine -- it's gorgeous at first bloom but quickly overgrows, gradually altering and choking its surroundings." (p. xiv).

jd