re: Has technology made us dumber, social media made us less social?

quote:

---

Dumber? Don't know. Made our brains weaker for sure.

---

Agreed

This is an easy question: does allowing kids to use calculators all the way through jr. High and high school make them dumber at math in the long run: absolutely.

Being able to "find" the answer isn't a sign of intelligence. Being able to DISCOVER the answer is a sign of intelligence.

quote:

---

Less social.....as we discuss on a wide-spectrum discussion forum where such detailed discussions were not available just 15 years ago.

---

Social media is really a Catch-22. I know we're more connected than we've ever been in history, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're more social. I think if you were in a bar in 2004 and were instantly transported in the future to 2014, you would be shocked at how less social it is. Maybe not late at night, but around dinner, over half the people are texting on their cell phones, when that was mostly just teenage girls back then.

And what is this going to do for the manner in which we make friends? Most of us can remember being in college at a time when there were no iPhones and hardly anyone had GPS. The very nature of arguing has changed now since I've been a freshman in college. It would go on for 30 minutes, each person insisting they're right, but now it's just a quick Google from our phone, and the argument is finished. While I love the plethora of knowledge available at my fingertips that used to take days of research, I do feel nostalgic about those old ways of arguing. Now it's really just philosophies we argue about or random stuff about people within your life.

Anything that is a basic fact now can be found in 2 seconds, to where it's not my generation I'm going to be curious about, but the kids 10 years younger than me who were never even given that opportunity. I have to wonder what their social life will be like, and whether it will spiral out of control to where every little detail of your life is documented (Facebook seems to have tried this for sure). I really enjoyed the film "Her", because I think that is a very plausible and subtle prediction for where our world and society are heading.