It seems that as more and more of us go online and spend increasing amounts of time immersed in digital lifestyles, a gathering body of evidence is emerging on the long-term effects of web usage. Warning signs show a groundswell of discontent over how the web is changing our children's minds - in some ways positive, others not.
The trouble, at least for me, started in 2007 with an article in The Walrus, in which author John Lorinc chronicled how digital devices are driving people toward a near-permanent state of distraction. The inability of people to focus on a given task due to a constant need to seek out new sources of digital stimulation is making us superb multitaskers, but spectacularly incompetent thinkers and citizens.
The second piece of evidence that something is amiss when it comes to digital culture was The Atlantic's recent publishing of Nicholas Carr's article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?
An unsettling argument on the nature of thought and contemplation in the age of Google, Carr effectively makes the case that the Internet is now preventing us from engaging in activities that create deep and meaningful connections to each other and our world.
Case in point - the act of reading books for pleasure. When was the last time you really sat down and spent hours engaged in deep reading, shutting out the world to your thoughts? Chances are if you say you can't remember when, you're not alone. But even if you have sat down and read mass market titles like Harry Potter or He's Just Not That Into You, the bigger question remains: are all our digital toys creating the illusion of having no time to read more often?
But Carr goes one step further than simply lamenting the decline of written culture; he argues that the intellectual and civic depth of a non-reading society like ours is essentially an inch deep and a mile wide. In short, we're becoming a shallow bunch of frantic, Blackberry-wielding ignoramuses.
The final piece of evidence for me was the recent publishing of author Mark Bauerlein's incendiary polemic, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30).
Bauerlein, a youngish professor of English at Emory University, lays out point by point a damning indictment of how digital culture's all-pervasive nature is turning young people into an intellectually shallow bunch. His targets of enmity - Facebook, YouTube, text messaging being his biggest sources of frustration - are numerous, but his argument is clear: in a society that provides no reason for young people to care about facts, dates and even historically significant events when information is a Google click away, what happens to memory? Culture? Even personal creativity?
Let me be clear: I'm not a sympathizer with those who would suggest we shut off the Internet and cellphones and return to the days of purely written culture. For all the negative tradeoffs the web has given us, the positive benefits of engaging in digital culture - enhanced analytical skills, better flexibility in terms of general knowledge and a greater interplay between different social groups, to name a few - are so great that we should never go back to the ways of old.
But these emerging cultural tidbits of information signal something may have gone wrong in our search for endless sources of information. While there are numerous benefits for an engaged, digital population, we should re-examine our priorities when it comes to how digital culture is changing the way we think and act.
Further, let's not assume that just by giving our children computers we can automatically assume they will be educated, informed citizens. In some cases, reading a book, seeing the world in person or just sitting with only your thoughts to accompany you can accomplish what no YouTube video ever could.