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Do Gadgets Degrade Our Common Sense?
ShelleyPortet writes "In a world where gadgets are growing more sophisticated, human behavior is changing — and not in a good way. That is what Robert Vamosi, author of When Gadgets Betray Us argues in his book, which examines the dangers of our growing dependence on technology. As gadgets develop the ability to multitask seemingly endless functions, Vamosi argues that people are increasingly unable to think for themselves. 'Instead of lifting our heads, looking around and thinking for ourselves,' Vamosi writes, some of us no longer see the world as human beings have for thousands of years and simply accept whatever our gadgets show us."
some of us no longer see the world as human beings have for thousands of years and simply accept whatever our gadgets show us
And how did the human beings see the world before? Yes, only the area they lived on. The culture, and the religion. They heard and saw what dictators, politicians and religious persons told them. It was a very far off from the reality and it still shows today with religion. I rather hear things from everyday people. Theres a lot of information and knowledge that would never come out of "official" channels. Or with todays technology I can travel the world myself and see those things. Yes, some people will never use that opportunity. But at least now it's possible for everyone and everyone can make their own decisions instead of some religion telling you what to do.
Yes, I've traveled to Asia and even had sex with shemales there. I'm thinking of marrying an asian woman, which seems to be a problem for the religious types in my family tree but not for anyone else. And that would had been completely out of possibility in communitys where religion tells you it's "immoral" to have sex before marriage, or hell, make all of their women wear clothes that can't even show their faces. Gadgets, internet and the technology in general has allowed me too see different parts of the world myself, and hear things from a lot of different kinds of people. It has also opened my mind and made me question the stupidity that religion is and like this article tries to imply, controlling information so that only a few persons can express their opinion.
The point is, most people didn't think on their before either. They followed what someone else in power told them - be that their parents, religion or their country. Now there's at least the possibility to choose.
Death by GPS was the first example that came to mind.
They just broadcast it to the world now and make it very obvious.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Maybe some people are getting mentally 'lazy'. I guess they could have said the same thing about all of the technology developed during the industrial revolution. I know that I'm certainly less apt to cut my grass "by hand" now that I have a nice power mower ... and that car sure comes in hand when I don't feel like carrying stuff home from the store.
oooor.... we can maintain our intelligence, be educated (as in learn how to think rationally, not be indoctrinated), be reasonable, and use these tools to augment our natural intelligence do things that weren't possible 50 or 100 years ago.
it's up to each person to do this for themselves. complaining that "people can't think for themselves" doesn't really get you anywhere.
Fundamental laws of physics:
1. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
2. Energy and momentum are conserved.
3. Every new technology must have an article by somebody talking about how it's going to ruin everything.
Evidence for #3 has been tested as far back as Socrates and Plato. I have no doubt that at least some cave paintings are really an editorial about how fire is going to end the species: with fire to keep us warm, who is ever going to have sex again?
If the point of the article is to say, "Don't be an idiot"... did you really need to spread that advice over five page views?
that never existed in the first place
"some of us no longer see the world as human beings have for thousands of years and simply accept whatever our gadgets show us"
LOL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_blind_leading_the_blind
certain people have always blindly accepted what was in front of them, and certain other people looked around and challenged their own assumptions. the proportion between these classes of people is innate, a random spread, a constant of the human condition. so it always was, so it is, so it always will be
technology is not changing essential human nature
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is with great pleasure that I read the learned words of this amiable scholar, Mr. Vamosi. It is thus prooved that the Gadgette may be more of a threate to the mind of our Republice than the gallopping steamship or railroad loco-motive. Tell me, in what respect may the Gadgette hope to improve upon the brain given us by our creator? Did He make our human brains to be cleverer than himself, and master over Him? If ye say "No," then how can ye say that we are then so wise and skillful as to make a Gadgette to be clever than ourselves and master over us? This is as ridiculous as the old familiar question: "Can our Lord and Creator microwave a Burrito so scaldingly hot that even He Himself cannot taste of it?" Nay, presume not that the creator (whether our Heavenly master or our own intellect) can ever be led by his creation into any realm except that of the Doomed Abyss. Thus, Gentlemen of the Republice, cast ye Gadgettes into the sea -- lest they hang about they neck as a great millstone -- and drag ye down to the depths!!
I don't think it's gadgets degrading common sense, it's our physiology working against us; the human body really doesn't do more than it has to. If you don't use muscle it goes away, if you drink too much coffee you're basically dysfunctional before your first cup of the day, I don't remember half as many phone numbers as I used to since I stated carrying an address book, etc. Those gadgets just provide a gateway for our minds and bodies to seek the path of least resistance.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Stupid people used to die young before they had raised off-spring. Break a leg due to stupidity before germ theory and penicillin and that could be it for you. This meant that not only did nature "select" for "common sense", it gave incentives to those with poor common sense to learn those important life lessons. These days you can be an absolute moron with no ability to understand personal responsibility and have access to amazing health care for free and get government handouts to house and feed you (at least in most of the West apart from America).
It isn't that humans have evolved significantly in the last century or two it is that those who would have been dead are now sticking around to lower the average. They are also generally failing to give their children values that allow them to do anything but barely survive inside societies safety nets (hence generational unemployment, and voters that vote for bread and circuses).
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
"Common sense" is a big misnomer. Sense has never been common. Most people have none, and did even before gadgets.
How ya like dat?
Technological advances of this nature leverage human abilities allowing human productivity to increase.
It is in large measure how civilization advances. When the moldboard plow was invented humans were able to plant more land. This made more food available and hunger decreased. Yeah people probably became weaker as a result of having to do less grunt labor. But was the overall effect bad?
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking."
--Alfred North Whitehead
My first computer was an Amiga 500. And, honestly, I was awestruck for the first week of ownership. I felt like I was living the sci-fi fantasy I'd had just 10 yrs prior. An affordable tech that was simply amazing to me at that point.
I remember drawing on it and thinking: "The generation that comes after me will be like gods of technology. They'll have been born with this in their hands and it will bring them to new levels of intelligence, tech and opportunity."
This is just not the case now 25+yrs later. I work a great deal with teens teaching them tech from an art and theater end. What I find is that they know how to use the front end with incredible alacrity and skill. However once that tech has a glitch or fails them they're dumb founded. Yes, I am generalizing, but I've found an overwhelming majority lack even the basic sense to trouble shoot. At best they just let it sit until someone fixes it. At worst I've seen them toss cell phones and laptops in the dumpster because it was broke. (And I was able to retrieve it and fix it later.) It's that lack of trouble shooting ability that is the key to me. They've never been taught to do that. It's not just the tech that is different for them vs. me it's the societal thinking. You do not fix stuff now and keep using it. You toss it out and buy new. And that has deprived them of the desire, curiosity and ability to think creatively and trouble shoot.
While the complexity of the tech has grown since my first introduction, with an almost perfect inverse the ignorance of that same tech's fundamental workings has grown. Your results may vary, but this seems to be the same experience with a broad scope of my friends and colleagues as well. I personally do not see it getting any better. It's created wonderful consumers and that's just what the market wants.
A friend of mine once couldn't lock his car - the button on the key wouldn't lock the car. He tried various things like waiting for 30 minutes to see if the car would lock itself, etc.
Eventually he was talking to a friend on the phone telling her about his situation ('cos he couldn't leave the car unlocked), and she asked him if he tried turning the key in lock...!
So yes, gadgets do affect our common sense. We get used to using a gadget to do something that we forget how to do that action without the gadget. Are we fast becoming a race of needing a specific tool to do a specific job...?
One thing that I wonder about is how medical technology will affect the human genome. For example, in earlier centuries, women with narrow birth canals, and their babies, frequently died in childbirth. Now, the lives of such women (and their babies) are saved via Cesarian section, and the selection pressure against genetic variations (mutations) that produce narrow birth canals has been reduced. In future generations, how much effect will this have on the anatomy of the average woman? After ten, or fifty, or five hundred generations, might we be in a situation in which childbirth without Cesarian section is no longer possible?
No, that will be decided by the lawyers.....
Back on topic - you making a few assumptions that don't necessarily hold. Narrow birth canal outlets can happen, but aren't especially common and more importantly are not the major reason for C-sections. Maternal deaths were typically due to 1) hemorrhage and 2) infection - neither one due much to genetics.
The broader question of what modern medicine is doing to change human genetics is harder to answer. Yes, we are keeping people alive that would not have reached sexual maturity in the 'olden days', but we're also preventing many deaths of otherwise healthy individuals that do become sexually (and in the case of humans, perhaps more importantly), socially active. Finally one has to be very careful ascribing evolutionary fitness to any given trait. It's common in the lay literature to suggest that some random trait (brain size, penis size, nostril size) improves evolutionary fitness and therefore was selected. Humans are fairly slow growing and haven't been around for all that long (in the geological time frame sense) - a lot of traits are carried along and not necessarily 'selected'. Anyway.
It's complicated.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'd say the issue is the thinking that if it's written down, I don't need to learn it. I can always refer to it later. Even more so with Smartphones and the Internet.
Knowing things helps you solve problems, create new things, etc. If people say, "If I need to know it, I'll just look it up" it may not be too far away that we don't know what to look up because we can't even make the basic connections between subjects.
This may become long and drawn out..but I am speaking from a different perspective than most I would think.
I have been a PC tech/web developer for around 15 years. I kept up with the latest gizmos and gadgets, technology and toys for a long, long time. My last stint was support at a University. My wife and I got the "get back to basics" fever, quit our jobs, bought some raw land and are homesteading 4 acres on the outskirts of nowhere.
In that change also came a paradigm shift about technology. While we have to use our laptops for our web business, more and more we are wandering away from the screens and towards the dirt. What I find is that the less time you spend with "a screen" the more you come to understand and envelope yourself with the real world..the world of dirt, the world of nature, the real world you cant touch on flickr and cant smell on facebook.
We as a society are evolving into a clinically sterile, see here is nature on the screen, whats a shovel people.
I am not arguing that technology is bad, merely making the observation that reality is changing for most people. That we as a group are living our lives more and more through screens and by dilution less and less in the sun. While the irony of me posting this here does not elude me, I will be shoveling up some garden and doing some garden work shortly. I hope you would have some real world to balance off "the screens" as well because to me, the human condition is not a clinically sterile parade of screens and gizmos.. it is about the sights, smells, grit, efforts and rewards you can only get once you run out of batteries.
Technology is a Force Multiplier.
If you're a brilliant scientist, you can use it to do even greater, more important work.
If your a tyrannical dictator, you can use to to further oppress and control your citizens.
If you're a blithering idiot you can stare at it as you plow your car into a group of children waiting for a buss.
Another disillusioned techie writes another anti-tech book about the way technology has made the general public dumber than it already is. Film at eleven.
People were, by and large, already dumber than rocks. This is, after all, the same species that wandered around in its current form for about 200,000 years before anyone noticed that seeds make plants, and only figured out in the last century or so that disease is caused by microorganisms and not evil spirits -- and still, a lot of people aren't convinced. The only thing that has changed is that people who previously did or said stupid things in private can now share them with the world on Facebook and YouTube.
That said, it's nice to see that the author is is a technology professional. Most of these books are written by liberal arts majors who are embittered by the presence of iPhones at their poetry slams.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I disagree with the premise. I think people have always had this problem. The thing about these "gadgets", as he calls them, is that they spread information faster and farther than was ever possible before. I just encountered this today with a forwarded email I received, from a very conservative friend, which stated that Sears is now selling X-rated DVDs. Without even looking into the situation, he just forwarded it on to all his friends adding the note, "Kinda sad because they sell great tools." It only took a few minutes for me to go to the Sears site and see that the email is a fabrication. It took only a few minutes more to discover that this is from an American Family Association (who?) alert sent out last year about "pornographic" art being sold at Sears -- which turned out to actually be pretty tasteful wall decor featuring nude bodies (not exactly my cup of tea, but to each his own). Even though it only took a few minutes to discover the hoax, it was easier for my friend to simply accept the news as the truth, and then angrily forward the information along to everyone he knows. However, if this were 1911 instead of 2011 and my friend had heard this rumor via word-of-mouth, he would have done the same thing -- that is, pass the rumor along without checking facts. People have always been stupid. Now they are stupid at the speed of light.
Proverbs 21:19