This Is Your Brain on Twitter
May 20th 2011 08:31
In his latest column for The New York Times Magazine, Bill Keller, The Times’s executive editor, likens clearing the way for his 13-year-old daughter to join Facebook to handing her “a pipe of crystal meth.”
I can’t say I have ever tried crystal meth, but I do visit social networks on a regular basis. Twitter, which Mr. Keller says he believes could make us “stupid,” has become an irreplaceable part of my daily life; it augments how I report stories, socialize with friends and share and consume everything from store coupons to breaking news.
Before I embraced the social flow of information on the Web, the bulk of my news came from the printed newspapers and magazines that arrived on my doorstep. Now this news is sliced and diced by my social circle, with the most important pieces of content from around the Web being presented to me like a neatly wrapped present each time I check my feed.
Could Twitter make me stupid? Absolutely. If I only followed funny cats that speak with poor grammar, I’d be on my way to a vapid state of mind in no time. But I don’t. I follow dozens of news outlets and writers; I follow chefs, neuroscientists and the president of the United States; and of course, I follow Mr. Keller.
As the astute Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
Another concern of Mr. Keller’s is the prediction by many that the smartphones we carry in our pockets will soon evolve into wearable computers — essentially turning us into cyborgs.
This future could not arrive soon enough. The smartphone that we have all grown completely dependent upon has become one of the rudest technologies ever invented. It harasses us when we have a new e-mail, text message or social network update. Technologies that are wearable and more aware of their surroundings, and therefore able to tell when it is O.K. to interrupt us, will let us wander the halls of society without our gaze turned downward and two thumbs clacking away on a mini-keyboard.
There is a fear by many, Mr. Keller included, that these devices will wipe out our ability to remember and force us to become dependent on the virtual world. Luckily for us humans, our brains do not work this way. Research shows that the human brain is capable of adapting to new technologies in less than a week, irrelevant of age or intellect.
As I’ve written in the past, Maryanne Wolf, the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts, points out that our brains were never even designed to read. This “technology” is something that we have to train our brains to do.
In the same way that we hack our brains to read, we are not going to flush away our powers of memory by adopting tomorrow’s technologies.
To return to the “pipe of crystal meth” analogy: If I had read Mr. Keller’s censure of Twitter and Company a year ago, I would have vehemently disagreed with almost all of his views. But today, after using these products voraciously for some time, I do see their detriments. When used to excess, these technologies that so easily connect us to people far away concurrently disconnect us from people who may be directly in front of us.
But I believe “excess” is the key word here. Used as a crutch for our relationships and memories, these tools and technologies could indeed spawn a flawed generation of people peering into their phones without regard for the world around them.
Now, has anyone seen my cyborg glasses?
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