Way Geeky Wisdom (From Walter Isaacsons NYT review of ‘Smarter Than You Think,’ by Clive Thompson) *skip to the final two paragraphs if this excerpt seems too long* ____________________________ Thompson avoids both the hype and the hand-wringing so common among digital age pontificators by sidestepping most of the topics that agitate the geekosphere, like whether Google is rewiring the neurons in our brains or Twitter is making the world safe for democracy. He comes across as a sensible utopian, tending toward the belief that our digital devices and social networks are, on balance, enhancing our lives and improving the world in the same mixed-blessing sort of way that writing, paper, the printing press and the telephone did. In debunking the doomsayers, Thompson has pleasant sport poking fun at history’s procession of pessimists, starting with Socrates and his prediction that writing would destroy the Greek tradition of dialectic. Socrates’ primary concern was that people would write things down instead of remembering them. “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories,” Plato quotes him as saying. “They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Thompson counters that Socrates failed to foresee “the types of complex thought that would be possible once you no longer needed to mentally store everything you’d encountered,” and he surmises that the same will turn out to be true of our ability to digitally store and easily access huge amounts of information and memories outside of our own brains. “What’s the line between our own, in-brain knowledge and the sea of information around us?” he asks. “Does it make us smarter when we can dip in so instantly? Or dumber with every search?” His answer is that our creative minds are being strengthened rather than atrophied by the ability to interact easily with the Web and Wikipedia. “Not only has transactive memory not hurt us,” he writes, “it’s allowed us to perform at higher levels, accomplishing acts of reasoning that are impossible for us alone.” That seems right. My own mind is cluttered with phone numbers I memorized as a kid, but nowadays I outsource that task to my smartphone. I’m eager to make this and similar tasks even easier, and improve my mind (or at least free it up for more daydreaming), by getting my hands on Google Glass. Thompson also celebrates the fact that digital tools and networks are allowing us to share ideas with others as never before. It’s easy (and not altogether incorrect) to denigrate much of the blathering that occurs each day in blogs and tweets. But that misses a more significant phenomenon: the type of people who 50 years ago were likely to be sitting immobile in front of television sets all evening are now expressing their ideas, tailoring them for public consumption and getting feedback. This change is a cause for derision among intellectual sophisticates partly because they (we) have not noticed what a social transformation it represents. “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,” Thompson notes. “This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn’t true of the average nonliterary person.” More important, the writing produced in the new world of blogs and tweets is being done, at least ostensibly, for public discourse and reaction. It may not be getting us back to the dialectic of Socrates’ agora, but at least it produces a more stimulating and interactive realm than existed before the Internet.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 20:48:49 +0000
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