Checking facts and faking expertise
Jason Lodge recently asked on The Conversation: is technology making as stupid?.
Of course this depends somewhat on what one considers to be "stupid". As Sue Ieraci's comment observes, "every generation appears to value its own ways of knowing and relating above those of the generations above and below." Lodge's article starts with whether or not rote learning has been displaced by ready access to sources of information such as Google. If so, we might be becoming "stupid" insofar as intelligence is measured by an ability to remember facts.
I, and probably Jason Lodge also, would be surprised if anyone still considered rote learning to be the pinnacle of "intelligence". Well before the World Wide Web even existed, there was far more information in the world than any one person could be expected to remember, and how many teachers these days would consider their students to be "intelligent" merely for copying something into an essay or computer program? Modern educators therefore prize skills like knowing how to find information, determining whether or not it is reliable, and synthesising it into a coherent response to a question.
I think that being able to recall a certain breadth of factual information is nonetheless useful: imagine that you had to resort to a dictionary to look up the spelling and meaning of every noun you came across! And imagine what a teacher I would be if I had to look up the textbook every time a student asked a question!
I suppose that knowing what needs to be remembered, and what can be left for looking up, is a skill of its own. A Java programmer who can remember the difference between "int", "double" and "String" is surely going to be far more productive than one who can't, for example, but it's probably safe for the same programmer to know that he or she can look up the documentation should he or she ever need to parse hexadecimal numbers using the java.util.Scanner class.When giving advice about presentations to my research students, I often advise them that they ought to be able to talk knowledgeably about their subject without having to look everything up as they go. The title of the article aside, I guess Lodge is really asking whether or not technology has made us complacent about what constitutes "knowledgeable". Has ready access to search engines and the like, he asks, made us imagine we are experts in subjects that we can't actually talk about except insofar as we can look them up?
On what technology would you like to depend?
While I was still thinking about technology-dependence last week, I happened to read an assertion in Jonathon Lyons' The House of Wisdom (p. 32) that "Accurate timekeeping would one day free society from the dictates of sunrise and sunset and recast the day or the hour as an abstract notion distinct from daily experience." This seemed a fairly peculiar idea of freedom given that, in Lyons' own words, it resulted in "the regular ringing of monastery bells" and "the tentative beginnings of an organized social order". Did we simply exchange slavery to the Sun for slavery to the clock?
Lyons goes on to claim that timekeeping enabled people to see "the universe as something that could be measured, calculated and controlled." I assume that Lyons was thinking about the "controlled" part when he wrote about the freedom brought about clocks, even though a clock by itself obviously contributes only to the "measured" part.
Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants makes much of the idea that technology gives us choices. Kelly has some vague idea that technology is important, and I have no clear idea of what he thinks it wants. Nonetheless, I can see the point that the invention of clocks, for example, gives us a choice between organising our days according to the Sun, or according to clocks.
I think "us", as opposed to "me", is an important word here. I like to rise with the Sun and get to work as soon as I have eaten my breakfast. But we Australians have made a social and economic agreement that shops and offices will open at 9am, or thereabouts, irrespective of what the Sun and I like to do. Being part of this society, I have to co-operate with it.
So perhaps Lyons isn't so peculiar, given that he refers to "freeing society" and not necessarily freeing individuals. As much as modern society is dependent on clocks, electricity, telephones and the rest, we at least arguably chose to depend on those technologies rather than the Sun, human muscle and smoke signals. So long as society chooses its technologies, rather than let its technologies choose it, society's freedom seems to be intact.
Transparent and opaque experience
Continuing the adventure of train timetables from my previous entry, I recently asked a similar group of friends if anyone could give me a lift to the nearest railway station. I was astonished to find that none of them appeared to know the location of the railway station, even though all of them drove right past it on their way home.
I suppose that my own perspective is biased by my preference to travel by foot and public transport: my car-driving friends might be similarly astonished that I can't comprehend the desire to live in or visit XXXX Heights that has never seen a bus or train, and which I think might as well be on the moon.
Nonetheless, I've long felt that car-dependent people have a somewhat less intimate understanding of geography than those of us who take the time to walk through it. I get a similar feeling after travelling by underground train in cities like London and Tokyo, where I'm effectively teleported from one part of the city to another without any experience of what lies between.
More generally, it seems that technology-dependent people have a less intimate understanding of the world around them -- at least in the sense that they don't experience it directly, even if people with modern educations have a better theoretical understanding of physics, biology, etc. than their Stone Age forebears.
This seems like a bad thing, but it is surely inevitable: no one person could experience everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and all the rest. My mode of travel aside, I don't farm my own food, prepare my own medicines, or even build my own computers.
An early chapter of Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen talks about people with "transparent" and "opaque" views of computers. People with transparent views are interested in how computers work, while those with an opaque view are only interested in what they can do. Before reading Life on the Screen, I sometimes characterised non-technical people as having a "magic box view" of computers.
I found Turkle's discussion refreshing in that she doesn't make one view superior to other, where computer nerds might consider the opaque view stupid and ignorant while woollier minds might disparage engineers as boring and inhuman. I've since come to think of good engineering and design, at least in part, as using the transparent view to enable the opaque view (or to enable the "magic" in my former terminology).
Perhaps the transparent view of technology (and geography) provides a more direct and complete experience of the world, and the person who took an opaque view of everything would surely be a supremely ignorant and uninquisitive one. But it clearly isn't practical to take a transparent view of everything all the time, and the opaque view is a very practical one.
