In an amusing episode of "The Simpsons," Lisa Simpson, playing the bad girl, steals all the teachers' editions of the school books. Mass chaos and panic ensues, with one teacher wailing, "WHO KNOWS THE MULTIPLICATION TABLES??" It's a funny line, and could be repeated today if the Internet ceased to exist. One imagines students digging for long-discarded encyclopedias or simply curling up in a fetal-like ball if deprived of technological research tools such as Google or even Wikipedia.
We can do research and communicate today in ways that only 20 to 30 years ago would have been portrayed in science fiction. With the Internet technology era, we can expand the length and depth of knowledge more easily; but can that same technology stunt our intellectual growth? In other words, "Are Machines Making Us Stupid?" That's the title of a new class at Weber State University, and it's a fascinating question. In the class, students are observed and tested for how they gather information with total Internet access, with limited online access, and no Web access.
The answers are no doubt fascinating and probably most of us, even if we're not college students trying to get a grade, should try it. Is instant, keyboard access to information providing us an appropriate depth of the knowledge we seek? Or would we learn more with newspapers, magazines, reference books, trips to libraries, and interviews with experts who created the online information provided via Google.
The answer is likely a mixture of both. The reality is that most of us aren't doing both, and much online information is related to us in a "duck-speak manner," in which we memorize and then delete much of the information into "trash." As Luke Fernandez, Weber State University manager of Program and Technology Development, and a teacher of the course, says, "Sometimes sitting in a quiet room, thinking about ideas, is a way of achieving greater depth of inner thought...." He's right. The course stresses inward thinking, holding information in one's hands and processing it, rather than outwardly seeking someone else's interpretation of knowledge.
Technology is moving so fast. For several decades, rotary phones triumphed; in 25 years, we've gone to punch phones, to cell phones and now smart phones. For 70-plus years, records provided music. Tapes flourished briefly, went away and now even CDs face better competition.
More technology is a blessing and a positive. Its negative threat is that it can provide a false reality to the user. Compare your Facebook "friends" to your non-Internet friends, and the threat is clearer.
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