Will our intelligence decline as technology continues to advance?
This past week I remember someone saying that as technology advances we all get dumber and dumber. Okay... let me think...
Certainly we have become more dependent on technology as it has become more prominent. Younger generations can barely stay off their cellphones for a few minutes. I don't know what I would do without my laptop - I use it for a lot of different things, including staying in touch with friends, connecting with professors, writing papers (and blogs!), editing pictures, browsing the internet, testing music, checking my email, etc. But does our dependence relate in any way to our intelligence?
We often use incorrect spellings to shorten words when we text, and it completely deteriorates our sense of grammar. We also rely on spell check to fix our mistakes, so we don't really learn the correct way to write. Calculators do our math for us! Why waste my time reading when I could just look up the summary on Sparknotes? Yeah, we depend a lot of technology, and we end up paying for it in our breadth of knowledge. I'm not learning things I otherwise would learn without technology, but I am learning things that people without technology wouldn't be able to learn. It's a give and take situation.
Before answering this question, I think one must distinguish between the related, but separate, concepts of knowledge and intelligence. Knowledge refers simply to the amount of information one possesses about the world. Intelligence refers to one's ability to understand, process, and learn new information, and come up with original ideas. I do think that, in some cases, technology can result in decreased knowledge. However, I do not think that it results in decreased intelligence. Furthermore, much of the seeming decrease in knowledge which many modern Americans exhibit is likely due less to technology than to sub-par educational systems. Regardless of the existence of spell-check, if schools require students to write a decent number of papers by hand or on programs without spell-check, the students will learn how to spell. Similarly, reading a lot as a child significantly enhances one's spelling and grammatical skills later in life. Incorporating higher-level reading instruction into lower-grade curricula would help young students develop both better spelling skills and a better grasp of correct grammar.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I also posted this on my blog if you'd rather read it there.
I apologize, I didn't feel the need to clarify the difference between intelligence and knowledge, but you're correct - it doesn't decrease our intelligence, but perhaps just our breadth of knowledge. Certainly hand-writing would help with grammar issues, but as we become more dependent on technology, the need for hand-writing decreases. Correlation? I think so.
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