Satellite Events are here again for 2011, a series of events throughout the year, in London, Europe and internationally. Making the Battle of Ideas Festival much more than just a weekend, Battle Satellites run through October and November: turning an intellectual feast into a Roman banquet. Click here to view other events available.
We have always had a complex relationship with technology. There are perennial claims that it may come to dominate us, or in some way undermine human values. In the 5th century BC, Plato’s dialogue the Phaedrus contained an early critique of the technology of writing at the time of its widespread adoption: Socrates voices concerns that writing will undermine human knowledge and authority and will ultimately be destructive to the Athenian polis. We find echoes of this in some of the responses to contemporary media technologies from Wikipedia to Google to Facebook. Some suggest our dependence on a range of digital ‘cognitive extension technologies’, are dumbing down culture, or even changing the nature of human consciousness.
Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has argued Facebook and related technologies are in danger of undermining children´s abilities to relate to each other in a basic face-to-face manner, though these claims have been fiercely contested. Professor Sherry Turkle, author of the influential book Alone Together has suggested our ‘pathological’ addiction to social media is making us ‘less human’. Others, such as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and novelist Zadie Smith argue it’s ‘flattening us out’, turning us into two-dimensional, dumbed-down, emotionally illiterate consumers.
Yet others believe human intelligence - rather being the simple outcome of evolution on a Pleistocene savannah - is always wrapped up with our use of technology. Our minds are not in the normal sense natural, or fixed. We may indeed think differently from our ancestors before telephones, aeroplanes, pharmacology; everything from the wheel to the locomotive has undoubtedly influenced our social relations and indeed our idea of ourselves as humans. So if human intelligence has always been forged in a relation to technology, is there really anything so special about the new technologies from a cognitive standpoint? Or, do our fears about the cognitive implications of the Web 2.0 say more about today’s cultural climate of determinism and pessimism about the future and a loss of faith in humanity? What has caused so many to view the internet and mobile technology so pessimistically?
Recommended reading
The new overlords
Man and technology are evolving together in radical new ways
Economist, 12 March 2011 http://www.economist.com/node/18329616
Facebook’s impact on the brain
The idea that the internet is having profound effects on our brain is back in the news this week with findings presented in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that there are correlations between the density of grey matter in certain brain areas and the number of friends both offline and through social networks.
The Independent, Tuesday, 1 November 2011 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/11/01/facebooks-impact-on-the-brain/
Electric selves?
The social web: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and the host of other technologies that invite us to connect to each other through a variety of internet-based interfaces seem to be technologies that provoke existential questions. Who are we? What are we? Where are we going?
Culture Wars, Tuesday, 1 November 2011 http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/electric_selves/
