The Horrors of Technology

Here's a PBS Frontline video telling us that using the Internet is ruining your brain because you are multi-tasking and that is re-wiring your brain to be unfocused, needy for stimulation, and unable to master hard tasks.

Oh my gosh! I've heard these kinds of horrors before:

• Books - Plato complained bitterly that students using written text were ruining their brains. The old oral traditions taught you the essential skill of memorizing long texts. Sure enough, if you rely on books, you don't have those wonderful skills of memorizing books and plays and poems. But reading expands your horizon by a factor of ten or hundred. I, for one, don't want to go back to the "good old days" of spending days and days to memorize some oral literature "jewel".


• Transistor Radios - In my childhood the transistor radio was despised as the ruin of teens. All that rock & roll was undermining ethics, discipline, and respect for elders. A youth lost in listening to some exciting song that spoke to them was viewed as anti-social because that time could be spent so much more properly in a family sitting room watching some variety show with songs, dances, yodeling, a ventroloquist with a puppet, and a guy spinning plates.


• Violent Films - Starting in the 1970s through most of the 1980s as a spinoff from the women's lib "consciousness raising" there was a big push to get violence out of films. Obviously watching something violent turns a person into a natural born killer. It's obvious. Because back in the innocent day of the 1930s through the 1950s there was no violence. No Valentine's Day Massacre. No Boston Strangler or Ed Gein. When Truman Capote's book In Cold Blood obviously documented people driven crazy by Sam Peckinpah violence in film. Oops. Peckinpah didn't do films in 1959.


• Video Games - All those hours playing games on a computer simply gave you fast twitch muscles. It atrophies the brain. Obviously playing games can't be serious. We are raising a generation of ignorant and uninformed kids who can only do a shoot 'em up. The fact that studies show that surgeons and skilled labour that needs complex abilities to visualize and manipulate in 3D demonstrate that video games developed these skills. The fact that games created a world where the socially outcast nerds found a community that gave them a small social group in which they could revel by relating the details of their video game lives.


• Internet - As this PBS Frontline show demonstrates, the Internet has created a "dumbest" generation that can't read a novel, that can't concentrate because they need to be "stimulated". Kids have lost their childhood. They've lost motor skills and social skills. They live in virtual worlds. They can't put the gadgets down and talk to the person next to them, they have to text them. It has dissolved our social fabric. It has rewired the brain and we will never have the skills and artistry of the past that required dedication and effort.

In short, I find this PBS Frontline "report" to be a joke. This is the same anti-change fear mongering we've seen before. The future always undermines the past. Relax. Let the people sort out for themselves what is important. I'll bet you that Internet & multi-tasking will take their place alongside other "distractions" like video, radio, books, etc.