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Saturday, August 7, 2010

Psychological Effect of Technology

Just finished reading this article on the effects of internet on the modern day society, especially child psychology. Somehow I feel that the point of discussion here is non-existent. As pointless as saying "Books will make you dumber. All information should be retained in memory and books are just working against that requirement." Technology has nothing to do with human intellect. Sure there are people who goof around all day on the internet looking at cute kittens, but such people in the Victorian era would still have sat down under a tree by the river and slept all day.Watching cute kittens, by the way, can be constructive in its own way.


Here is how innovation worked 70 years back:


1. Newton sat under a tree and a apple fell on his head.
2. He asked himself the fateful question - "Why didn't the apple just fly away?"
3. He went home and did some (old fashioned) research by asking physicists, reading books and collecting as much knowledge as he could, about the strange phenomenon.
4. When he didn't find his answer he sat down and theorized his own.
5. Then he ran that by the great minds of that time and verified his findings by being able to explain a lot of other things (like Earth's rotation around Sun etc.) based on his theory.
6. He published a paper with his findings
7. Rest is history.


And now, what part of this whole process was something that Newton did, and  others before him did not?? Some will say it is Step 2, asking the question. But I beg to differ. The fact is we all ask ourselves a lot of questions, and I am sure people at that time also did. But very few persist in their quest to find the answer. So in my view, the steps 3 and 4 are what made Newton a great man.


Now, here is how the innovation would have worked if Newton was born today, and the Laws of Gravitation were still unknown:


1. Newton sat under a tree and a apple fell on his head.
2. He asked himself the fateful question - "Why didn't the apple just fly away?"
3. He went home and did some Googling, and posted the question on various forums.
4. When he didn't find his answer he sat down and theorized his own.
5. Then he ran that by the great minds of today at the Consortium of Physics, IEEE etc.
6. He published a paper with his findings (which was also available on the Internet for the world to read)
7. Rest is history.

Now, the point here is that Internet is just a tool of doing things differently than they were done before. The basic process is still the same. Also, some people blame the apparent dumbness of today's kids to the social scenario, educational system etc etc. But they forget that, except for the advent of technology in the modern world, little else has changed. Otherwise Socrates would not have had to say this hundreds of years back:


"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."


(The credit to the above quote goes to Charolastra)

So the bottom-line is that Internet and Technology in general defines our way of living today, but that is what it has been doing ever since cavemen created fire. To blame the lack of intellect on anything including technology is wrong, because there is no lack of intellect. Today, there are just more parents and teachers who (quite unreasonably) want their children to be Einsteins. But every child is not Einstein, and never was.