Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/analysis/7935725.stm
A growing number of scientists are concerned that we are creating a digital generation, growing up online but unable to think, concentrate and learn in the way that their forebears did.
Kenan Malik examines the latest research to ask whether they are right to worry – or whether we should we asking wider questions about how we all use new technology.
He hears from leading neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University.
“My worry is that the child who will be so immersed in digital media will really have the benefit of only part of that entire reading circuit,” she says, “rather than a deeper probative function of that information, the going beyond the information given.”
An opposite point of view comes from the Canadian web guru Don Tapscott, who believes we are creating the brightest generation in history.
“Time online is not taking away from hanging out with your friends, learning the piano, talking to your parents or doing your homework,” he says. “It’s taken away from television.”
And, he argues, that means the digital generation are more curious, sophisticated and intelligent than their parents.
e’s backed up by the writer and self-confessed “dweeb” Stephen Fry who believes that there is no opposition between the web and the book: “They complement each other quite beautifully.”
“It seems to me insane to think that somehow they’re betraying Goethe and the great panoply of Western civilisation simply by engaging fully in the life of the net and the computer.”
Yet Kenan discovers some surprising research from a huge project at University College London. They’ve discovered that both young and old engage in rapid, superficial reading of the web.
The project’s head, Professor David Nicholas, is concerned that the real problem is that younger web users lack the information assessment skills of those trained to use conventional libraries.
“I think a lot of people are being disenfranchised … are not able to benefit from the fruits of an information society because they don’t know how to handle that vast amount of information which they have to make sense of.”
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What do you think? Is it internet really able to make us stupid? To some extent, I need to agree. But on the other hands, if we are “creative” enough, I think we can make full use of internet facilities and information to broaden our knowledge as well. It’s all depend our background, as how we “digest” and “how acceptive” of different people’s perception.
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