Is new technology making us dumber or undeniably smarter?
With the rise of new innovative technology, may questions are beginning to rise about the effect technology has over us. one of these questions, perhaps the biggest, is whether or not new technology is making the human race smarter or dumber. Based off of ‘Smarter Than You Think’ by Clive Thompson and through own personal experiences and thoughts,its quite apparent that technology is not making humans and the human race dumber but it is doing the exact opposite. It is making humans the smartest they have ever been because it is helping them with essentially any thing they need to learn about. One of Thompson's major points goes against everything the famous Greek philosopher Socrates stood for because Socrates believed that writing things down would prevent people from retaining information and remembering things. Thompson argues that not having to remember everything and having easy access to it allows us to learn more and achieve more. This is because we no longer have to remember all the little details and we instead focus on more complex thinking and reasoning behind what we are reading. It gives us more space and time to dive into things rather then just trying to remember what the actually say. Thompson also makes a valuable point that technology is allowing people to share more of their writing and complex thoughts then they ever were able to before. this allows people to write more because they are writing for a audience to share it online and because they are writing more, they are getting smarter.
Another article that touches on this is ‘How Technology Makes Us Smarter’ by Greg Satell and this article shows that the web encourage people to move around it which allows people to take in more information then they ever did before. Since it is so easily accessible, people can go around as they please which allows people to learn new things because everything they need is all in the same place, the Internet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/smarter-than-you-think-by-clive-thompson.html
http://www.digitaltonto.com/2011/why-technology-makes-us-smarter/
