This post should have really come before my Storybird and after our last lecture on Web 3.0. The article below appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald this morning and articulates a lot of the issues some of us have been concerned about throughout this unit, regarding our increasing reliance on technology. For all it's plusses, we must also keep in mind the minuses to the technological revolution.
What particularly interested me was how the article says that Google has actually made us smarter by "“turning us into superheroes of the mind”. However, what happens when we lose the gadget that gives us these "super powers"?(Mark brought this point up in our last lecture.)"Just say somebody steals my iPhone, you might think that's a form of theft but if I'm right that should actually be reconceived as a really vicious form of assault by getting in my brain and messing with my neurons,” Professor Chalmers said.
In a comment I made on someone's blog last night, Blogsprog I think, I said that I agreed that we (or me, at least) read differently depending on the medium. Meaning, digitally we tend to skim as there are so many other distractions on a digital page, whereas in a book we just focus on what we are reading. Well, how clever am I, and again, I quote from the article below,
"Social networks, while pleasurable and fun, increase distractedness by bombarding users with brief bits of information. 'We take in so much information so quickly that we are in a constant state of cognitive overload,' Carr argued. 'Multitasking erodes cognitive control. We lose our ability to say that this is important, this is unimportant. All we want is new information.' In contrast, when readers open a printed book, 'there's nothing else going on except words on a page, no distractions. It helps train us to be deep thinkers.' "
Have a read of this article as well as the links and the video - very interesting stuff!
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