In 2008, Nicholas Carr’s provocative article Is Google Making Us Stupid? and his subsequent followup book The Shallows asked what many had been wondering – are digital devices leading to ‘dumbing down’? Carr thinks so. Steve Johnson’s retort – Everything Bad is Good for You – argues the opposite; that actually young people’s engagement with these devices are making us smarter. So what’s the truth?
The evidence is beginning to come in, and what’s emerging is surprisingly consistent with what we might expect. Take texting, for example. Researchers at the University of Coventry in Britain (study here) found that kids who sent more than two text messages a day had significantly lower scores on literacy tests than children who sent none. So texting = bad? But the same study showed that greater use of text abbreviations (like “c u l8r” for “see you later”) was correlated with stronger verbal reasoning ability. So texting = good? Of course there are all sorts of questions raised here – and that’s the point; there is no simple answer. Technologies favour some learnings over others; the medium is not neutral. The same applies to TV; studies how that hours of watching television is negatively correlated with amount of general knowledge known. But that’s not always true – when the TV shows are public television, news, or documentary programs, the correlation is positive. In other words, it all depends on if you watch informative or uninformative television. I am as sure as I can be that the same would apply to that much more traditional technology – the written word. While I am generally in favour of reading, it is not hard to find books and magazines of very little value. So should we read a lot? Well, it depends on what you read.
My examples are taken from a longer article by Journalist Annie-Murphy Paul, who writes brilliantly on this. The full article can be found here, and makes for fascinating reading. So do digital devices make us stupid, or smart? The answer is ‘it all depends on how we use them, how long we spend on them, and what we do not do as a result of spending time on them” and in this, digital devices are just like any other technology.
Which leads me to advertise an upcoming event for you to make in your diaries. Jeff Plaman and Adrienne Michetti, our Digital Literacy Coaches are running a Demystifying Digital Games workshop from 7pm to 8pm, 24 Feb in Conference Room 3. Digital games take up a fair proportion of some of our students’ times (I speak as a father who regularly debates optimal strategy on Plants vs Zombies with my son). Some are educational, some offensive, most neither, and some both (!). If you’d be interested in exploring some of the ideas I have touched on here, discussing how to face the challenges games pose and how to make the most of the opportunites, please do come along. As we head into the Chinese New Year break, the challenge is, I think, to find the right games – and while we need to read these critically, 9 ways video games can be good for you and 23 Great Games are interesting food for thought.
