Today's assignment for HUMN1001 - Digital Culture

Asked to respond to a series of articles orbiting around the question, "is the Internet making us dumber?" I offered these thoughts in advance of tomorrow's tutorial discussion:

Reading Carr’s article in the Wall Street Journal and his comments about detrimental changes to human memory in Genevieve Roberts’ article ("We're missing the real danger, that human memory is not the same as the memory in a computer”) or re-reading Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Cassandra-lite’ narcissist hyperbole (“As we obsessed over the future of this and the future of the, we ended up robbing the present of its ability to contribute value and meaning” … you may have Mr R but the rest of us got on with lives with their usual share of value and meaning, successes and failures, etc.,) it’s hard not to think of Monty Python Flying Circus’s sketch, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ 

Apart from the world wide web, smart phones, Massive Open Online Courses everywhere, 160 million mobile Internet-users in a country like India where not so very long ago (most of the 20th Century) almost no one had access to a telephone), readily accessible information on almost everything (from Google and Wiki to peer-reviewing networks of Professors in Astrophysics and everything in between), 24-hour banking, instant hotel reservations, pizza delivery real-time tracking and the ubiquitous cat videos … what have the new technologists ever done for us? 

I do not mean to sound like some starry-eyed Pollyanna salivating at the prospect of the next ‘latest thing’ from the Apple Corporation (what can I say, I’m an Android man). Nor am I ignorant of the underpinning social, political and economic realities of this supposedly post-industrial, information age – control and ownership of the worlds means of production, distribution and exchange is more concentrated today in proportionately fewer hands than at any time in modern history since the world was run by Kings, Emperors and Popes. 

But … 

I am genuinely intellectually shocked by what I would describe as the naïve, ahistorical, un-analytical, almost intensely personalised reflections of (debatable) loss by commentators such as Carr, Rushkoff and (in week 2) Lanier, whose “Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution around the turn of the twenty-first century” seems to be built on a personal disappointment that MIDI doesn’t do the sounds of sax with the flair of John Coltraine or the violin with as much invention as Yehudi Menuhin.  The ‘glass half empty’ gang need better arguments than those I’ve read so far.