Technology Frees Our Minds... To Cause Train Wrecks?

A terrible train crash in LA involved a passenger train engineer who was sending text messages (on his McCain-invented Blackberry?) while operating a train at high speed. The distracted engineer ran a traffic signal and his train collided with an oncoming freight train. 25 people (including train engineer/text-sending Robert Sanchez) died and 130 people were injured, 40 were in critical condition. The worst train wreck in Southern California in 50 years was caused by technology. If this is (fair & balanced) Luddism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds.
By Damon Darlin

Everyone has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr.

To save you some time, I was going to give you a 100-word abridged version. But there are just too many distractions to read that much. So here is the 140-character Twitter version (Twitter is a hyperspeed form of blogging in which you write about your life in bursts of 140 characters or fewer, including spaces and punctuation marks):

Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains’ wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence.

If you managed to wade through that, maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress.

With Twitter, people subscribe to your “tweets.” Those who can make life’s mundane details interesting garner a large audience. Several services have been created to compete with Twitter. Others have been started to help people manage the prodigious flow of information from Twitterers.

There is even a version, Yammer, for use inside companies. You follow the word bursts of particular employees. (“In the weekly staff meeting. Good bagels. Why is everyone wearing khakis? All staff must file their T.P.S. reports on time, O.K.?”) As if there weren’t already enough to distract us in the workplace between meetings, phone calls, instant messages, e-mail messages and those Google searches.

If people question the benefit of Google, which has largely liberated us from the time-wasting activities associated with finding information, there is outright hostility to a tool that condenses our lives into haiku. The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was asked by M.I.T.’s Technology Review magazine — in a tweet, of course — why when people who aren’t familiar with Twitter are told about it, they are “uncomprehending or angry.” His response was brief and unsatisfying: “People have to discover value for themselves. Especially w/ something as simple & subtle as Twitter. It’s what you make of it.”

It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. In his Atlantic article, Mr. Carr says that Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man’s ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. It wouldn’t be the last time.

When Hewlett-Packard invented the HP-35, the first hand-held scientific calculator, in 1972, the device was banned from some engineering classrooms. Professors feared that engineers would use it as a crutch, that they would no longer understand the relationships that either penciled calculations or a slide rule somehow provided for proficient scientific thought.

But the HP-35 hardly stultified engineering skills. Instead, in the last 36 years those engineers have brought us iPods, cellphones, high-definition TV and, yes, Google and Twitter. It freed engineers from wasting time on mundane tasks so they could spend more time creating.

Many technological advances have that effect. Take tax software, for instance. The tedious job of filing a tax return no longer requires several evenings, but just a few hours. It gives us time for more productive activities.

But for all the new technologies that increase our productivity, there are others that demand more of our time. That is one of the dialectics of our era. With its maps and Internet access, the iPhone saves us time; with its downloadable games, we also carry a game machine in our pocket. The proportion of time-wasters to time-savers may only grow. In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.

The pessimistic assumption that new technologies will somehow make our lives worse may be a function of occupation or training. Paul Saffo, the futurist, says he could divide the technology world into two kinds of people: engineers and natural scientists. He says the world outlook of the engineer is by nature optimistic. Every problem can be solved if you have the right tools and enough time and you pose the correct questions. Other people, who can be just as scientific, see the natural order of the world in terms of entropy, decline and death.

Those people aren’t necessarily wrong. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement. Certainly there have been moments when that thinking has gone horribly awry — atonal music or molecular gastronomy. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

[Damon Darlin was named technology editor for The New York Times in May 2007. Darlin joined The Times in August 2005 as a West Coast correspondent and “Your Money” columnist. Previously, Darlin was senior editor at Business 2.0 since 2002, where he began as executive editor in 2000. From 1997 to 2000, he was assistant managing editor and managing editor at U.S. News & World Report. Before that, he was senior editor at Forbes Magazine since 1993. Darlin was the Seoul bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal from 1989 to 1992. Previously, he was a Tokyo correspondent for that paper since 1986. He was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph-Herald in Cleveland, Detroit and Dubuque from 1980 to 1986. He began his career in 1979 as a reporter for the St. Cloud Daily News in Minnesota. Darlin received a B.A. degree in American history from the University of Chicago in 1979.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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