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Masters of the new world
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Is technology, meant to make us smarter by making information from around the world available to us at the push of a button, actually dumbing us down?
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ON A DIFFERENT KEY Gadgets have changed our perception of knowledge
"... Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
T.S. Eliot, Choruses From The Rock
Imagine somebody who could remember his entire Shakespeare from memory. Gasp! Or someone who could just walk into the classroom and spool off T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party without even having to look (no, not even a stealthy glance!), even as you desperately rummaged through pages of the book trying to catch up. You could for one call it epic memory. Or if you are of the Internet-ipod age, you could damn the person as being from Stone Age, fuddy-duddy, or old and foolish. I, for one, would want to look at is as more than just phenomenal memory.
If you are talking of a phenomenal memory for numbers, then you could count this dudette in. When numbers can be summoned at the push of a button, she still prefers to call upon them from the abyss of the mind. All this to the horror of people around her, looking as if she was an extra-terrestrial object and a technologically challenged one at that.
At the press of a button
But to put them at ease (and to unburden herself of a gnawing guilt), the dudette decided to speak a colossal truth on what the largesse of this radical phenomenon called Internet had done to her: the eminently memorable lines of Khalil Gibran and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, which the dudette in her glorious days of self-reliance could recall from those sparkling corners of her brain, are now beckoned with the press of a button even by her!
Just when the dudette was lamenting the loss of a past when she was far less parasitic, she stumbled upon Jackie Ashley who wrote in The Guardian on how memory, once built up in a verbal and reading culture, matters less when everything can be summoned at the touch of a button. She couldn't agree more. The fact that the world's knowledge is at your "beck and call" is certainly beguiling. But does this world, overloaded with gadgets and gizmos, dampen our motivation to remember anything at all?
Modern brain
Clinical Professor Richard Restak in his article titled "Mapping the Modern Brain" says that the human brain's organisation and function are literally shifting to adapt to increased demands placed on it by media and technology to include the television, cell phones, e-mail and Internet among others. He says how, driven by technology, the brain has undergone the biggest modification in the last 200,000 years, from that point when the brain volume of the Homo sapiens is said to have reached the modern level.
With this change, Restak thinks the brain is being forced to manage a bulk of information in intervals that are constantly shrinking. In fact, researchers at the University of California have this startling spill, which says the information published in the world has tripled in the last decade. It is now about 800 megabytes of information produced for every man, woman and child on the planet. For a world that's on the move, gadgets have come as a big boon. It's no longer a daunting task to get in touch with your friend who lives on the snow-capped mountains in distant Antartica. If you work in crazy shifts and don't have the time to invite people over for a weekend bash you've been planning, all you need to do is send out a common sms.
Even as you put out this long list of advantages, you know that technology has changed the notion of intelligence. The world knows only too many who earned the label "good worker" before they lost their jobs to an intimidating technology and were dubbed "useless". "You cannot be just good with studies, you have to be good with computers also to be considered intelligent," says Nikhil, a class VIII student.
Product of the times
True of the times that he is born into, he loves gadgets and gizmos. He loves surfing the Net. In fact, it is from here that he reads up for his school assignments and books are only the next option. "Video games are my favourite pastime. Not that I don't love books... ," he trails off, rather undecidedly. Isn't that testimony enough to signify, as Ashley puts it, that "we have slipped away from a culture based essentially on words to one based essentially on images or pictures"? And one chit of a three-year-old told the gob-smacked dudette in no uncertain terms that he likes Noddy on television more than in a book "because his car doesn't move" in the book!
Summing it up, photojournalist K. Gopinathan says: "In the past, we made mistakes, learnt from them and perfected our art. But in this new world of technology, there is no room for mistakes. The machine achieves perfection for you while you can continue to remain half-baked." He remembers the years he toiled over the study of light, theory of photography, the various kinds of lenses... all redundant in the present times. "Now, the man behind the camera is only incidental."
Pathologist Dr. Anuradha Vivek doesn't feel any different, even as she has personal favourites among the many offspring of technology. She sees technology-oriented modern medicine coming as annihilators of all the skills that came with the traditional school. For instance, a CT scan and X-ray are ordered right away and the time-honoured patient examination skills are getting obsolete. "I see this as a great danger. Machines should only substantiate or confirm our diagnoses," she insists.
Technology has sure changed our dudette's life too. For one, the notion of private space is fast fading. She can no longer listen to her favourite music or get lost in that new book or pamper the champak plant that has just burst into buds or have an uninterrupted chat with friends, for, the microwave beeps, the mobile screams, the washing machine says it's done, the comp says there's a mail...
The poor dudette has found a way out: she has simply decided to surf the channels mindlessly and make Internet the presiding deity of her life!
DEEPA GANESH
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