Will This Blogpost Make You Stupid?

Are computers and internet making us stupid?  Over the last several years I have felt a growing unease with the steady march of our new technologies creeping steadily deeper into our lives.  Cell phones and computers and tablets and smart watches and the like.  Everywhere you look, people are missing the physical world around them.  Grocery lines, traffic lights, living rooms, porches, gas pumps, restaurants… anywhere that we are afforded a single moment of opportunity, we reach for our devices.

  How did we go from it being geeky to have a device with “the internet” to almost everybody having one in a decade or two?  More importantly, how did those devices become so prevalent and pervasive that it has changed entire societies so quickly? I remember a time in which the ordinary trip to town didn’t even come with the consideration of people sitting around paying most of their attention to their devices… and I’m in my mid twenties.

I understand the irony.  Writing a blogpost about how technology might not be that good for us… on my MacBook, posted to our website, and promoted on our social media accounts.  Don’t get me wrong, I love new technologies!  I’m here for the self-driving cars and smart exercise equipment. I’m not even denying that I get a definite bit of enjoyment whenever we need to buy a new computer or any other technology for the office. 

The positive impact that technology has had on all of our lives is undeniable… In the general debate about how good or bad technology is, we often lose sight of the fact that technology isn’t just computers.  

Consider watches.  Before your average Joe could afford a pocket watch, the whole town may have only had one clock or none at all.  If two farmers working in their fields had decided to meet at a local diner at noon, they could have quite easily shown up at a “noon” that ranged from 11:30-12:30 or more.  If the first farmer thought that the sun looked like directly overhead at 11:30, he could have sat at the diner for a full hour before farmer who thought the sun looked directly overhead at 12:30 showed up.  I’m no cultural historian, but I suspect it was not a source of deep frustration to the first farmer that he had to wait all that time until the other farmer showed up.  That’s just the way it was.  How would he have a good grasp of time, if he had rarely even seen a clock? 

 The technology of the clock, has completely reshaped our world.  We aren’t even aware how much control the concept of minute by minute time tracking controls the way that we live.  I’ve heard  an employer talk of standing out by the parking lot watching his phone waiting to see if any of his employees showed up one minute late.  They got three strikes, and then they were gone.  Im not here to argue whether that is good or bad. My point is that those farmers at the diner would look at you crosseyed if you tried to explain the concept of being fired for being a minute late three times.  The clock has dramatically changed the world since then, and we don’t even notice it.  Again, my point is not that clocks are a bad thing… just that technologies change who we are.  

“The medium is the message.”  If you have spent any amount of time looking into the effects of technologies on us,  you have undoubtedly come across that quote by Marshall McLuhan.  

“Bless her heart” can mean “Isn’t she stupid” or it can mean “Isn’t she sweet”, depending if it is presented with the medium of sarcasm or the medium of genuine appreciation.

What does “The medium is the message” mean?  Honestly, there are too many levels to the sentence to dig into in this particular post.  An example of one aspect is the phrase “Bless her heart”.    “Bless her heart” can mean “Isn’t she stupid” or it can mean “Isn’t she sweet”, depending if it is presented with the medium of sarcasm or the medium of genuine appreciation.  The way in which a sentence is said is as important as the sentence itself.  

This concept of the carrier(medium) of the information being as important as the information is often lost in the conversation of what effect technology has on us.  It’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the information we are consuming on our devices is more important than the fact that we are consuming information from our devices at all.  

While it might seem as though it is the same thing to let your kiddos look through your camera roll on your phone as it was for you to look through your mom’s family album on the coffee table, it is definitely not.  I’m not qualified to get into the actual effects that devices have on our brains, but it’s pretty clear that they are mostly negative.  

Something as innocuous as pictures in your photo app are presented with the flashy, short attention span glamour of our current technologies.  While each picture could be the same as one in a physical photo album, they each present a myriad of decisions.  Whether you want to or not, your brain needs to decide whether to pinch and zoom or to swipe left or right to next picture.  Similarly, reading an Ebook with actual links in its text only serves to distract from the book’s message, rather than enhance it.  There is simply too much information being presented for our brains to take it all in.

Does it really matter?

Maybe the new technologies of today are basically just newer, more fancy versions of the clock and written language.  Although clocks and written language becoming ubiquitous were world changing, it’s impossible to say we are worse off with them.  Again, I’m actually pro-technology…technologies are supposed to be world changing.  

“pancake people… spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

When I see the steady march of connected devices into every waking minute of our lives, I wonder if we are going to end up being a bunch of shallow thinking know-nothings within a few generations.  Or, as playwright Richard Forman put it, “pancake people-spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Because we are so immersed in a culture of technology, it is easy to forget that we are barely even in stage 1 of a trial of how this will effect humanity.  The ramifications of people sitting on their couches not saying a word to the person beside them, but rather communicating with whomever through a small box with a screen that they hold in their hand, are hard to project.  

What is the Solution?

Recently, I had a conversation with somebody who did not have any internet-connected devices, and he was confronting the decision of whether or not he and his family wanted to begin to introduce the internet into their lives.  He asked me if I had the choice, would I reintroduce the internet into my life or not.  The question was harder for me to answer than I would have guessed.  

If you could choose to just eliminate the pressures and time drain and change that our devices represent, would you be willing to drop the benefits that they also afford? I finally concluded that my answer wasn’t total abstinence.  The world is far too invested in the new age of devices to turn back the clock, even if we wanted to.  

There is almost no doubt that if we try to completely avoid the new wave of technologies, our children or children’s children will need to confront them anyway.  In my mind, a better solution is to realize that this new wave is world changing, and we need to confront and accept it as a powerful tool. What does that look like?  To me, it looks like not only realizing that it is here to stay, but also making a conscious effort to create boundaries in our lives.

Practical Application.

Never let your child use a connected device that you don’t understand.
“I have no clue what that thing can do” is opening the door for real heartache.  If you don’t have a good idea what your child’s device is capable of, find out or eliminate it.  

There are endless trapdoors for your children to fall into with almost every single connected device. 

There are endless trapdoors for your children to fall into with almost every single connected device.  Start with the premise that any connected device is not innocent.  There are tragic stories of young children being lured into trafficking by “users” on their connected gaming consoles.   Either figure out a way to identify and eliminate the traps, or eliminate the device.  The risk/reward isn’t too hard to figure out when you take a few steps back and consider the emotion, physical, and mental damage that can take place in the dark corners of the internet.   This doesn’t mean that the internet or all connected devices are all bad, just that they aren’t all innocent entertainment or productive devices.

As I have increasingly noticed the creep of technology into the world around my, I have especially noticed how omnipresent phones have become. Phones can transform a family from playing board games several evenings a week to spending every evening sitting around scrolling through Instagram in three years. 

Create real, practical guidelines. 

We have a standard of no devices after 7:30 every evening.  If we need to use our device after 7:30, we need to ask the other spouse for permission to use it.  That sounds a little crazy written down, but the goal is to create a barrier to devices just creeping into our living room and taking over every evening.  Turns out, it’s hard to sit around on your device before 7:30 when you have a few toddlers.

A few easy places to start:

No phones at the table. No phones in the bedroom (no excuses about the alarm clock, you can literally have one on the way in 2 minutes with this link. https://amzn.to/3qxmavZ  No excuses about emergency calls either… set your phone just outside your room or maybe just inside the room). No phones in the living room. No phones are short local car rides. We’ve even considered having a basket just inside the door that our phones can live in while we are at home but we haven’t made that leap yet.

The objective of these guidelines is to create an awareness in your life of the creep of phones into you and your family’s life.  Try them for a week or a month.  I’ve been amazed how difficult it can be to uphold even one of these rules and honestly we are still working toward finding the right lines and upholding ones that we know are good ideas.  The whole internet world is spending billions of dollars to figure out how to get you to live in their world, and they are pretty good at it.   The odds are, if you don’t create hard boundaries in your life, you or your children will almost certainly end up living in their metaverse… their online world in which you live most of your life’s waking hours.

Again, I’m not anti-technology, I just happen to believe that the real world is a better place to live in the long run than any curated Metaverse. Decide what you want your home’s device usage to look like and make it happen.  For the past decade or two, we have been slowly overtaken by our connected devices, and that’s definitely not going to stop unless we decide to make it.

If you are interested in a more in-depth read on this, check out this book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. by Nicholas Carr. https://amzn.to/3qB23wG. I found it to be readable but also the author also took time to dive into important details and concepts.