In so many ways, technology makes our life easier. Anything we want to know (or want to buy) is at our fingertips. Computers, smartphones, and tablets – all of them have played a part in helping us become more efficient, right? Or have they?
As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic from Psychologytoday.com puts it, “Life has become more complex but we hardly ever notice it because technology has made complexity simpler than ever”. Technology has changed the way we order food, the way we do business, the way we communicate, and the way we learn. There are apps/websites for nearly every restaurant, so that with a click of a button food shows up right at your doorstep. To swipe credit cards, people now use devices such as “Square,” which plugs into your smartphone’s headphone jack processes credit cards. There are apps/websites where you can create flashcards to study and computer games designed to help us learn. We are exposed to so much information through the television, internet, and our smartphones, which leads me to believe that we have adapted to process all this information faster and more efficiently. Is there any proof to this however? And if we are able to process more information faster, is this making us smarter?
This TIME magazine article looks at different studies regarding the effect of different technologies and summarizes some of the studies I am about to discuss. The TIME article talks about how technology helps us consume information faster, but does this mean we are actually learning the information?
Intelligence is defined as the “ability to think and learn: the ability to learn facts and skills and apply them”.
Look at the technology of “auto-correct”. We use it every day, it makes the task of texting faster, but is it actually improving our cognitive skills? In a 2009 study, 317 7th graders were recruited from 20 different schools. The students completed a series of three cognative tests (specifically “an exposure questionnaire based on the Interphone study, a computerised cognitive test battery, and the Stroop colour-word test“), and after adjusting for errors, it was found that “overall, mobile phone use was associated with faster and less accurate responding to higher level cognitive tasks”. Because of the amount of participants and the fact they adjusted for errors, I would say the results have value. Read more here. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19644978
Technology delivers the facts to us and we interpret them, but the ease with which we can obtain these facts makes us more likely not to retain them. In 2011, Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University did a study on the effect of search engines and the way they change how we use our memories. She did a series of experiments that tested the participants’ memories for information based on different ways to find the information. They seemed to be well conducted but she did not include if she chose her participants. Read about the specifics of each of the four experiments here.
Based on the experiment, she found that when people expect to have access to information, “they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it”. This means that Sparrow’s study concluded that “the Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves”. In other words, we are not absorbing more knowledge, we are banking on it to be stored somewhere and easily accessed.
Look at the example of this class – during the first blog period, many of us didn’t get an amazing grade because we just reported facts we found on the internet and were less inclined to think critically. Andrew even pondered that this was an effect technology may have had, saying “I worry that the Facebook generation is not used to the idea of serious work being posted on line.“
Let’s go to the root of learning – schools. Do teachers think that technology help improves learning? The general consensus is that teachers find technology is helpful to students. It increases their engagement nd helps them to visualize things. “Why Teacher’s Should Use Education Technology” by Jeff Dunn even reported that 92% of teachers agree they would like to use more education technology in the classroom than they currently due, pointing towards the conclusion that technology helps kids learn.
We would have to compare many more studies to come to a sure conclusion, especially because there are some aspects that fall through about the studies above. One only makes conclusions about 7th graders and one does not specify what population their participants are representative of, but their conclusions show changes in the way humans are processing information. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic from Psychologytoday.com also says “[humans’] ability to solve problems depends not on the knowledge they can store but on their capacity to connect to a place where they can retrieve the answer to find a solution.”
s this making us smarter or dumber? Some say we are smarter for having “produced a unique human intelligence” by creating resources that we can reference as “the access to raw information provided by the internet is unparalleled and democratizing”; others say our “deepening dependence” is changing the way our brains work for the worse. I agree with the Times article – to the question of whether technology is making us smarter or dumber, “The answer is ‘both,’ and the choice is up to us.” What do you think?
Read more:
Does Technology Make Us Smarter or Dumber? | TIME.com http://ideas.time.com/2012/11/29/how-to-use-technology-to-make-you-smarter/#ixzz2mOEsPaQu
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201305/is-technology-making-us-stupid-and-smarter
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.full
http://www.bing.com/search?q=definition+of+intelligence&form=IE10TR&src=IE10TR&pc=HPNTDFJS
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19644978
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/technology-making-us-smarter-you-think/
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate
http://www.personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/SIOW_Reflections/blog/