Our personal own progress

[Druidic]

I think you may be a shade too optimistic, Nomis. In any case, we’ll both be dust before the issue is resolved. Still there’s always a price to pay for technological Progress. If you believe in Global Warming (I don’t insist you must) that’s an apparent price of Progress. Check out the following link to see how dismally American students perform when compared to their counterparts in other industrialized nations. This may just be an optimist/pessimist thing, but I don’t think so. Since I’ve been known to be wrong (gasp!) I won’t pretend the issue isn’t debatable. But I think a general dumbing down is real, especially in regard to history, mathematics and reading skills.


The Broad Foundation - Education

[Justin Isis]

If u can keep your writing/creative time intact then the technology is not a problem. Just keep it balanced with time for being social. So if you spend at least three nights a week out with other people (at underground raves and minimal techno events in the forest, drinking parties with other parents, meetings at the country club etc.) then you shouldn't worry about using the Internet. Keep in mind the country club itself can become a huge time suck and is possibly less recommended than Facebook.

[nomis]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

Check out the following link to see how dismally American students perform when compared to their counterparts in other industrialized nations. This may just be an optimist/pessimist thing, but I don’t think so. Since I’ve been known to be wrong (gasp!) I won’t pretend the issue isn’t debatable. But I think a general dumbing down is real, especially in regard to history, mathematics and reading skills.

Two responses: the first is you are conflating issues that affect America with issues that affect humanity. As America is not those sole bastion of intelligence in the world, its lower scores aren't indicative of technology making people less intelligent (unless you're suggesting these other industrialize nations don't have the same access to the internet). The second is that technology isn't the reason for low testing scores in America, but rather poor education, and an insistence on "teaching to the test" rather than imparting knowledge.

If you want to debate the decreasing knowledge of young Americans, that's fine. But it's not a technology issue. Don't lay it at technology's doorstep.

Technological “advance” does not make us better human beings or improve the world, In fact, I think it makes for worse people by virtue of the demands of immediate “up-to-date” judgements. The blind acceptance of this form of constantly trumped-up so-called “progress” is a disaster.

It lends itself to the depersonalization of communication to the extent that virtual interactions can pass for in-depth authentic knowledge of an individual or idea systems, especially when they happen to be out of synch with contemporary mores. Whereas more effective means of communication in the past have sometimes been regarded with suspicion, to posit the example of the first printing press as a valid counter-argument is just silly. The sheer volume of ephemera that modern electronic instant communication now makes available was simply not comparable to paper-published commentary where once editorial safeguards existed.

A large swathe of the populace couldn't even read back then, and nowadays most folk, though having been forcibly state-educated, now choose not to do so. Moreover, people's attention spans have been so degraded that only the glibly sensational holds their attention and has come to form their daily diet. The acquisition of knowledge and culture as an end in itself has been corroded.

Sure, this dumbing-down tendency is evident even way back in the growth of mass television or radio broadcasts before then, but that does not devalue my argument---it's a mere blink of the eye in terms of the overall culture and history of humanity.

The internet is only, in and of itself, interactive television affording the viewer feedback with the illusion that their feedback is significant. It doesn't matter on what intellectual basis the feedback is rooted, since opinions, however arrived at, must be regarded as all equally valid in our current intellectual climate.

And don't think that the “progressivists” haven't recognised this tendency. They gave up on the working classes in favour of capturing and moulding the ideas of the teacher/student intelligentsia in the class room a long time ago. Apparently the working classes were too dumb to actuate the revolution required, and wouldn't vote for it. In case you'd not noticed, identity politics replaced the class struggle during the 1960s. If you had the ability to think, it was necessary to circumscribe your thought ideologically.

It's bizarre not to acknowledge that our modern age's set of western cultural mass values primarily consists of a particularly puerile diet of celebrity worship, profit-mongering married to moral self-righteousness, internecine gossip, and soap operas. This is a unique phenomena, one spawned in the “enlightened” countries, but which now threatens to spread its standardised banality across all the other cultures in the globe and strangle them to death. Ye Gods!

The benefits of the internet, of facebook, and of twitter to humanity overall when compared to books? None, save unceasing amusement, self-promotion/advertising and finally the shortening of an individual's attention span to the degree that any opposing view of the contemporary status quo is invariably characterised as here in certain quarters, as “Luddite”.

Mind, we have certainly reached the grand stage of progress where self-published books can be as appalling as the most illiterate blog you can find out there on the internet. Happy days, eh!

Mark S.
(with apologies to Niall Verde)

[gveranon]

"It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion."

-- Max Beerbohm

[Druidic]

Nomis, the toys of technology are not conductive to strengthening one's attention span. There's a reason young people text rather than email. It requires less thought and less effort. Because of America's relative prosperity, these toys are more common here among the young than in some industrialized countries. I'm not talking about the beneficial aspects of the Net, I'm talking about mobile devices, ridiculous tweets about Nothing, people unable to sit still for one minute in a doctor's office without producing a hand held chunk of distraction. If you don't think diminishing attention span equals poor academic performance, then we can't even pursue this subject fruitfully.
This isn't an argument anyone is going to win, one way or another. Only the future will show if this dumbing down is taking place. Only problem: Who's going to judge then?

[Cnev]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

None, save unceasing amusement, self-promotion/advertising and finally the shortening of an individual's attention span to the degree that any opposing view of the contemporary status quo is invariably characterised as here in certain quarters, as “Luddite”.

My apologies for using the term "Luddite". I didn't mean it in any derogatory sense so please don't take it as such. I just had this same conversation with a real-life friend over the weekend, during which the term was thrown around a few times and still in my bank, apparently. Thoughtless and lazy use on my part.

Please don't feel the need to apologise to me. To be honest, I hadn't noticed who'd used the term in particular, and my remarks were more targeted generically than personally--so I hope.

Mark S.

[TheWierd]

America sneezes and the world catches a cold. To my mind, most beings in the Eastern sphere of the world do orient themselves by America, assimilating their what they call 'culture'.

It can’t be healthy to have an electrical firework similar to the impulses when you are on red alert going down in your brain when the mobile device is just ringing. I know more than one adult being who has to put one and one together on the mobile calculator since he does not want to put up with some higher mental activity like calculating because it might turn out to be demanding. If calculating is already viewed as tiring, what does that imply for the rest of thinking? Thank god we got tabloids and breakfast TV so we need not form our opinion all on our own.

[Malone]

I think we need to be careful when declaring that the human race is sinking into incurable mediocrity as a result of technological proliferation. I suspect this view comes from a myth of prelapsarian human perfection and a golden age that never existed. In my opinion, the increase in global communication and so on is a good thing, in that it allows everyone to have a voice. Media, whether print or electronic, is no longer the preserve of a small elite. If this ease of access reveals the essential 'mediocrity' of the human race, then all the better. Perhaps it will encourage people to be more realistic in their expectations of life and others. If a form of Nihilism is the destiny of the race, then so be it.