"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it." - Neil Postman from speech given the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik)
As educators, we have a responsibility to empower our students with the tools needed to survive and thrive in our modern environment. Undeniably, the political, social, and economic environment of the 21st century is rooted in technology, or more specifically, the Internet. As such, teachers in the modern era feel overwhelming pressure to respond the demands of the digital age by utilizing every technological tool we can lay our hands on. Indeed, the ISTE standards compel us to equip our students with the technological literacy they will need to compete for employment in the digital age.
However, in our race to keep pace with technology, like Web 2.0 tools, I feel we must keep a critical eye on our endeavors. The communicative power of new tools like blogs are unquestionably reshaping the social landscape our students in which our future generations will grow-up , play , and work, but we seldom stop to seriously reflect on the nature of that change, to cast a philosophical light on the manner in which humans are shaped by technology.
How, for example, has the Internet shaped the way we think and our most fundamental patterns of learning? In a recent article in the Atlantic titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid", author Nicholas Carr muses:
"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "
What Nicholas Carr speaks of here is a change in our habits of mind, a change brought about by a new mode of thinking fostered by the quick access and abundant nature of information on the Internet. With the Internet, in order to attend to the information we need, we must sift through volumes of information. As such, we seldom attend to any single source of informational text very long or with great depth. The Internet compels us to value breadth of knowledge over depth of knowledge. Simultaneously, it asks us to shift our attention rapidly rather than focus it deliberately.
What are the ramifications of this mind-set? Of course, I can speculate, but before educators rush headlong into advocating for the virtues of technology and supplying our students with the technological skills necessary to realize those virtues, perhaps we should engage in a discussion about the role technology plays in shaping human thought and behavior. To be clear, I do not shun technology. Besides the obvious irony of arguing against technology via blogging, I feel that it would be grossly negligent to leave our students unequipped to attend to the practical realities of the modern world by denying them technological skills, simply because I have personal reservations regarding technology. I simply submit that we should become more reflective consumers of technology.
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