4

Theme 4
Starting with MacLuhan's ideas about how media create new environments and new ways of thinking,as a special case of technological determinism, explore the idea that we take on the qualities of the " intellectual technologies" we use,or, to put it another way, that media shape out thought processes.What are some concerns that have been expressed ( in articles such as " Is Google making us stupid?", "In Defense of to Distraction", and " Old fogies in their 20's") in relation to new media for our thinking attention and memory? In particular, discuss concerns about the decline in reading- especially the reading of books.
Macluhan believed that the medium is the message; that it's not what we get off the internet that matters, but the computer/phone/iPod we're accessing it from. He believed very much in the ideology of technology, or the belief that technology brings improvement. His thinking was that people change around technology and so under the idea of technological determinism our society changes to support and develop the new medium. There have been many arguments such as the of Nicholas Carr in "Is Google making us Stupid?"
"As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of inf ormation. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
Many educators feel this way about today's youth. They feel that students have lost their capacity for learning and studying the way students had before there was such an influx of hand held technologies. Many adults seem to be against the advancements made in technology, they see it as interruptions in their daily life. They believe that children are becoming dumber and dont have the good old fashioned values that they should. This is due to the fact that children are being educated by the internet and merely skimming across a vast number of topics. They now learn only topical information as opposed to delving deep into a subject for an extended period of time, which isn't entertaining enough to keep their attention. Children need to constantly be stimulated and this works against them in today's educational system. There are some teachers, however, that don't hate technology. They say that we teach kids to be quiet and sit in chairs, but in the future no job will require people to sit in a seat and be quiet. Technology is like oxygen and by giving children more access to technology you are giving them more opportunities. The world has sped up in many ways but education hasn't. The reason today's students aren't as successful in school is because they are multitasking 24/7 and the human brain is not meant for that kind of stimulation. What really happens in the brain is that it switches its attention from one subject to another, so reaction time is significantly lower that the multitasker would believe. This multitasking serves as entertainment in many ways. Communicating with friends, listening to music, browsing social network sites, trying to do homework is keeping kids entertained but they aren't being efficient at any one of those things. That is one very strong reason for the decline of popularity of book reading. People can no longer keep their attention focused on the small lines of words across hundreds of pages. There are no colorful advertisements or instant messages popping up to keep their neurons firing. But is that really making us dumber? Some believe that that is just the price of gain and we must move forward with an open mind and explore.