Continuing
the theme of my last post on digital
devices,
I really enjoyed the PBS.org documentary Digital Nation, which talks about the
growing dominance of digital media and interaction on all our
lives. My husband and I had to pause the TiVo every five minutes to
process what we were seeing. Both the entire documentary and short segments are
available at this link.
My last two sentences
are an ironic commentary on the message of the documentary itself: Are all our
digital devices making us dumb, prompting us to think in sound
bites instead of essays and willing to settle for just good enough instead
of great when it comes to knowledge and information?
Or is the current
transformation just a case of a new generation finding its own way? After all,
every generation in recent memory has been more productive than the last.
However, that tide could
be reversing. Even though each generation of Americans in the past century
has lived longer and been healthier than its parents, the next one promises to
be sicker, given the unhealthy quantity and quality of food we eat and the
emergence of gaming over playing. And paradoxically, this decline is all a
result of our affluence and access to "the good life".
I'd love to hear your
thoughts. Are we doomed to dumbing down, or just taking some time to get used
to this new world?
Hard to say how it will shake out. I'm sure the printing press reduced our overall ability to remember details, but that was probably a decent trade-off. I see two areas of change happening right now, but it's too soon to know whether the trade-offs will be worth it:
1. Decreasing time for deep thought. As we become more and more interconnected, the time taken for receiving, interpreting, and responding to messages and signals squeezes out time that might be used for contemplation. Most of my best ideas throughout my career have come either (1) while reading a book that allowed me to get absorbed in a single idea for an extended period of time, (2) from having a long, deep conversation with one or two associates, or (3) contemplating alone without interruption for awhile. It's getting harder and harder to do any of those.
2. Loss of serendipity. Even though newspapers and hardcopy encyclopedias and dictionaries might be considered dinosaur technology today, one of the hidden benefits was that you might come across something interesting while looking for something else. RSS feeds and Wikipedia searches constrain me to topics that I already have at least a little knowledge of or interest in. Even though there may be links in the content, the links are to related material. Sure, I could click on the "random article" button in Wikipedia, but it's not really serendipity if I have to consciously click on a button to find random information. I remember as a kid spending countless hours on the floor with an encyclopedia because I started out looking for something and found so many other interesting things along the way.
So maybe these changes will dumb us down and decrease our ability to innovate, or maybe they will enable us to innovate in ways we never dreamed of before. Maybe the innovations will shift from those attributed to individuals to collective innovations from whole societies. Who knows?