Dumbed down

Of course, this implies that previous generations were reading Dostoevsky in their free time and not watching Happy Days. But the point is not that Digital Immigrants necessarily read more Dostoevsky, it may be that more of them had the mental capacity to get through it if they so chose. Reading is something you need to practise doing, and Bauerlein says Digital Natives simply don’t get enough practise slogging their way through difficult texts, particularly as more technology is integrated into classroom learning. “It’s a big modern problem,” says Merzenich. “Getting through an actual book requires a certain level of persistence. It’s a long-term attention to something in which the rewards are maybe not coming every two seconds.”

This is true of writing, too. James Côté, a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario and co-author of Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, argues that the university essay is barely worth assigning anymore—even though the investigative skills and in-depth critical thinking skills it teaches are as relevant as ever. Students just can’t do it, he says—their language skills are depleted, they are indiscriminate with source information, they have a hard time focusing on things for too long, and they don’t particularly care to improve. As a teacher, it’s demoralizing. “In the old technique of assigning the essay, the student would pick the topic, they would go to the library to research it to determine if it’s a topic you can actually write something about,” he says. “Now most students can’t pick a topic. If you tell them what to do—okay, here’s a selection of three topics, pick one—they can do it, but on their own, most cannot come up with a topic that they can write meaningfully about.”

Technophiles say what we’re losing in memory we’re gaining in productivity. Every time we don’t have to memorize a phone number or take a trip to the library to research, we’re freeing up our brains for other tasks. But what other tasks? And are we even doing them? Studies tell us multi-tasking itself is a myth. We expend valuable time and energy transitioning from one interface to another. A recent study of Microsoft employees found that each time they responded to an email or instant message, it took them 15 minutes to return to the work they were doing.

All of the things that technology was supposed to make us better at—communicating, understanding, doing many things at once—we’re doing worse. Even though Google will always be there to provide us with answers in a pinch, Merzenich says, “I still have to believe that the invention, the creativity, these fabulous human assets, are absolutely dependent upon having rich resources and content in our very own brains.” The alternative would be to argue that we don’t need to be intelligent anymore because we’ve got machines. “Is that what we want?” he asks. “Is our goal to create a brainless society?”