Rewired, not fade away

A lot of nonsense is still being talked about how technology is damaging our lives, and how the Internet is 'rewiring our brains'. From Nicholas Carr's dystopian scaremongering in The Shallows, to Andrew Keen's bitter rhetoric in Cult of the Amateur, the literature is replete with those who wish to persuade us to repent from our reliance on technology and put on our analogue sackcloth and ashes. There is a never ending supply of doom merchants who are ready to emerge from the shadows into the literary spotlight to peddle their bad news, and once they have done so, exeunt stage left with a nice royalty paycheck.

Their arguments are diverse, but essentially boil down to this: The way technology is currently being used is dangerous because it dumbs down knowledge, trivialises relationships, and ultimately, over a period of time, turns us into its slaves. A recent article in the Telegraph asks 'Is the digital age rewiring us?' The article then goes on to cite a range of scientific studies that support an affirmative answer to the question.  It lists a litany of negative outcomes of our habituated use and reliance on the Web, including a loss of social contact, computer addiction, memory deterioration, loss of empathy, increase in rudeness, loss of privacy, and the introduction of a new word - cyberchondria - which describes a rise in hyperchondriac incidence in GP surgeries, and a supposed link to greater access to information about health issues. There is very little of a positive nature in the article, and with the exception of reports that technology 'can keep us sharper for longer' and that video games can teach us new skills (strange that, when elsewhere it claims that our skills are being blunted), one would come away with the impression that we are all doomed, and that technology is the ultimate nemesis of all humanity.

Let's stop one moment and rationally examine the evidence, and also the premise behind the article. The author makes his first mistake right at the start of the piece when he distinguishes between digital natives and immigrants. This is contentious, not least because there has never been anything other than anecdotal evidence to suggest that older people and younger people perceive, or use technology any differently. Marc Prensky's digital natives theory has been misappropriated anyway. Moreover, there are much more relevant and appropriate theories that describe this generation's use of technology, and even Prensky's revised and updated theory of digital wisdom would be better applied, as would Le Cornu and White's theory around context - digital residents and visitors.

One of the biggest and most persistent claims of the Telegraph article is that technology is rewiring our brains. Several neurological studies are cited (but conveniently with no directly checkable sources) that suggest technology permanently alters the structure of the brain, and in so doing changes our behaviour more or less permanently. All well and good, but there is a fundamental flaw in this argument. Read farther afield than the narrow chain of references in the article and you will discover that just about everything we do - drinking, eating, arguing, reading, sex, playing sport, driving, hobbies, also alters the wiring of the brain. In the world of education we call this 'learning', and it stands to reason that using technology will also rewire the brain. The scientific terms for this is neuroplasticity, meaning the brain is in a constant state of fluid change. It has even been reported to occur after brain damage where the brain then 'heals itself' by rewiring previously damaged areas (See for example this article by Dancause et al, 2005). This is not a new finding, so we must be very careful that we don't fall into the trap of condemning technology as the only culprit, and laying all of the ills of society upon it when in fact life is far more complex than one single causal factor. You can see why I'm very suspicious when pseudo-scientists use very narrow terms of reference to argue their points.  

What about the argument that this generation is 'hooked on the web'? Just like the previous generation was hooked on drugs? Or the generation before that was hooked on Rock and Roll? It is a great error to assume that technology is addictive or has the power to addict. Any addiction, as many psychiatrists will agree, has its explanation more in the personality of the individual than it is to any inherent quality of the substance or item they are interacting with. Read, for example, this piece by Mason (2009) on the addictive personality, and you will see that such seemingly clear cut arguments are in reality far from straightforward. Consider instead that people who are addicted to Facebook might be addicted because they have chosen to use Facebook excessively, not because Facebook is inherently addictive?

Finally, we should all be highly sceptical of any article that generalises to such an extent as the Telegraph article has. Not everyone who answers their mobile whilst in a conversation is 'anti-social', not every young person prefers to txt their friends rather than meet with them personally, and not everyone relies on their mobile phones to recall their telephone numbers for them. And even those who do these things - does this mean they are lesser people as a result? Or are these simply the signs of a new, emerging cultural norm? Did those running the 'cyberchondria' study actually consider that instead of negatively and pejoratively labelling people who are concerned over their health as 'hyperchondriacs', perhaps they should be applauding them for becoming more proactive and aware of health issues in general? That's what tools such as Wikipedia do, you see. They democratise knowledge.

My final thought: An important rule of research is - don't make assumptions, or in other words don't be biased. If you are, you'll become very selective in the data you use, and end up with conclusions that don't bear any resemblance to reality.

As ever, I welcome your comments.

Photo by Tom Swift


Rewired, not fade away by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.