By Harper Skrzypczak, Editor-in-Chief.
The seats of the lecture theatre were full. Audience members stood in the wings and sat on the stage’s steps, Feb. 10, during Delta College’s 17th annual winter President’s Speakers Series.
Speaker Nicholas Carr, a New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, has been writing about how computers and technology change human minds for over a decade.
Carr began his presentation by quoting the first sentence from Collegiate Managing Editor Matt Brown’s opinion piece “Cell Hell.”
“To survive in the current social climate, one has to be connected,” Carr reads. He laments that the statement is true. But just 10 years ago, Carr says nobody would have written that sentence.
“What we’ve done, I think in recent years, is really changed the way we live thanks to the technology we all use,” says Carr.
Going without your phone for more than a couple hours, Carr says, can make people feel panicked. “If you look at studies, if [people] lose their phone… they do feel panicked,” states Carr. “If they’re without it for even three days, they feel they’re missing something really important. After three days they calm down and begin to realize ‘Oh, maybe that wasn’t as important as I thought.’ ”
Carr believes that humans are good with technology, and that we adapt it into our lives very quickly without thinking about it.
He warns, however, that the screens that we’re constantly looking into can become a “glass cage.” This idea came to him after years of writing about technology. One day, he sat down to read a book and realized he was having trouble.
“My brain kept telling me ‘oh, you should go check email… oh, you should go do some Googling,’” says Carr.
He believes that the technology was changing the way he thought because he seemed to be losing his ability to concentrate.
“I wanted to be kind of stimulated, the way we get stimulated when we’re looking into a computer screen, all [of] the time,” says Carr.
This began Carr’s research on our digital dependence and how it shapes our brains. He looked through history to find examples of earlier technologies that “had a deep influence on people’s lives, particularly their intellectual lives,” says Carr.
What became clear very quickly was a small, but important, set of intellectual technologies. Carr says these are the tools that we think with.
“When a new intellectual technology comes along and is broadly adopted, it very much tends to influence the way people’s minds works,” explains Carr.
One of the earliest intellectual technologies is the map, according to Carr.
“Suddenly, people became more and more aware of abstraction, of the fact that behind the world as we experience it with our senses, there’s patterns. It set off a whole new way of thinking,” says Carr. “Along the way… we lost some of our ability to make sense of nature with our own senses. And this is a common theme. Whenever you adapt to a new technology, there are trade offs. The technology encourages you to think in ways the technology is good at supporting, but it discourages you from using your mind in different ways that the technology doesn’t support.”
Maureen Donegan, assistant professor of psychology, attended the presentation and teaches both in person and online classes. In her online classes she tries to, “use new learning technology that encourages engagement and creates a community of learners online.” She uses software called VoiceThread which hosts online lectures that she creates for her students to view.
Carr argues that in recent years, we’ve created a new digital environment in which we live more and more. “You can’t even carefully distinguish between the digital environment and what we used to call reality. They’re completely intermingled,” says Carr.
He believes this encourages thinking that it is all about gathering information as quickly as possible. “We human beings are naturally geared to want to know everything that is going on around us. Well, you give us this technology, and not surprisingly, we spend huge amounts of time gathering new information.”
This information-rich environment is also an interruption-rich environment, according to Carr. Services such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. are constantly pushing information at us and “we’re constantly gobbling it up,” explains Carr.
Donegan says that divvying up her time can be difficult. “It’s challenging because so much of our work is online.” Although she wants to be available for online classes and has an “urge to respond to them [students] immediately,” it can be difficult to concentrate when she gets emails from students and other faculty, all while grading online work.
Smartphones, Carr says, can be an almost constant distraction. He sites a British study of smartphone users. Researchers asked participants how many times they check their smartphone per day. Participants said about 30 times. However, the app that was tracking user activity showed participants checking their phone 90 times a day.
“It turns out that in the U.S., studies show that the average smartphone user looks at their phone 150 times a day, which works out to every five to six minutes of your waking hours,” explains Carr.
When you add in everything else, computers, video games, etc., “you very much see that we live in this environment of constant distraction,” says Carr.
One thing we’re in danger of losing, Carr believes, is our ability to think deeply. “You have to look at how our brains work… we take information and weave it together into knowledge. Because to be smart isn’t about Googling stuff very quickly. Being smart is about having your own knowledge, about weaving all of this information that you’re gathering into something bigger, to a broader context, that allows you to think conceptually and creatively.”
Carr says we have two kinds of memory. “One is a very short-term store of memory called ‘working memory.’ And this is basically the contents of your conscious mind at any given moment… the information you’re trying to make sense of right now.”
Our working memory has a very small capacity, and Carr explains that we can only hold three or four bits of information in our conscious mind at any given time.
Long-term memory, however, has a huge capacity. “No one’s ever filled it up,” says Carr.
The key to building our knowledge is to move incoming information in working memory over to our long-term memory, explains Carr. This process is called “memory consolidation.”
“What happens when we’re constantly interrupted… is that we overload our working memory. If you can only fit three or four pieces of information in your conscious mind, and you’re constantly taking in new information, then you have to shove existing information out of your working memory… to make room,” says Carr.
Consolidation of information into your long-term memory can’t happen and “you’re not creating rich knowledge,” explains Carr.
Our dependence on screens, says Carr, optimizes our brains to shift our attention quickly. However, it also weakens mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination and reflection.
As computers continue to have great influence over our personal lives, Carr urges they’re also affecting our working lives. “No matter what career you go into… that job and that work is going to be shaped by computers,” says Carr. “We’re going to have to constantly figure out what is the best way to divide labor between the human being and the computer.”
Carr also claims we’re developing software incorrectly.
“The aim [in software development] is to reduce a person’s engagement, to reduce the effort they have to make, to reduce the challenge,” says Carr. “As a result, you get very weak learning, you get very weak skill development. You get trapped into this cycle of dependency on computers. The more the computer does things for you, the less talent, the less ability you develop to do those things yourselves. And then, you become even more dependent on the computer.”
Carr explains this cycle of dependency turns us from people who had rich skills and thoughts, to computer operators. Carr believes you can see this with factory automation. People thought the automation of factory jobs would elevate workers to a higher level of thinking and effort, but the opposite happened. Craft skills went away, and people pushed buttons and foot pedals.
“I don’t think there is some simple solution I can give,” says Carr. “We become dependent on it, and we begin to allow the technology to determine the way we live, the way we think, the way we act.”
If you’re concerned about the loss of rich skills or thoughts, there are things Carr suggests that we do.
“If, as a society, we want to challenge the dominance of computers, we have to move away from pushing everybody all the time onto computers,” says Carr. “We have to do it in our jobs, we have to do it in our schools, we have to do it among our friends, as well as family members.”
Carr urges us to think of the ways we’re designing software. “We have to be smarter about how can we help people develop the rich skills they’re capable of, and use the computers as a compliment to human skill rather than simply assuming that a computer should be a replacement.”