Does Technology Make Us Smarter or Dumber?

One only needs to read emails to see that literacy rates have suffered the most.

If you use that as an index than, yes, we have devolved quite a bit!

In a written report, I found myself wanting to "Ctrl + F" the things I was looking for. Technology has not only impacted our literacy, but has also made us incredibly lazy!

It's 'then'

Ha! That is too funny! QED!

I think anything that forces us to learn something new, like the internet has to make us smarter. As one said, it makes us lazy. That may be true, but lazy doesn't equate with smart or dumb; two different things. I can learn from the internet. The alternative to the internet is getting into my car and driving down to the library and spending hours trying to find what I want only to learn that it is not available. I can find out in ten minutes on the internet what used to take me hours in a library. It's only a matter of time before libraries will disappear from our communities.

And if Fox 'news' has its way it'll be sooner rather than later : http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/30/fox-news-advocates-s.html

GA.

I remember when there was this big deal about electronic calculators making people too dumb to actually multiply or divide. (Probably proliferated by slide rule manufacturers ) At the end of the day the only thing that really matters is whether your result actually flies.

It's interesting that the internet can make us both smarter and dumber. The ability to access information quicker helps us, in a way, to be smarter. But at the same time, too much reliance on the internet can make us dumber if we forget that much of what gets posted is edited, opinionated, incomplete, or simply wrong.

There is a lot of knowledge stored in books that will never be available through the internet due to the lack of demand for a book or lack of manpower to scan it. Even if an old book is scanned and converted into readable text, there may be critical bits of information in the margins (corrections, for example) or details in drawings and figures that is missed during the scanning process.

All technology has a good side and a bad side.

The internet allows us to find "the answer" ten times faster than before. Does it matter that 9 times out of ten it is the wrong answer?

Calculators are mentioned in one post above, has anyone seen a store clerk that can make proper change today unless the cash register tells them how much they owe you?

Technology is like any tool, it is all in how you use it. Todays information highway will be used by some to expand their horizons, widen their outlooks and gleen knowledge from previously unavailable sources. Other will spend a thousand hours a week on facebook.

The same school system that turned out the likes of Stephen Hawkin and Martin Luther King Jr. also turned out a whole slew of Homer Simpsons. Its not the system (or the technology) its the people.

... or to put it another way: Knowledge sources don't dumb, people do.

Although not the main subject of the thread, the article refers to global warming science as an example of how technology can be manipulated and mislead people.

Our understanding of planetary processes is about as good as our understanding of the human being. We know a lot more than people did 100 years ago, but to pretend that either side of this debate is etched in stone, slam-dunk knowledge is arrogant.

The best we can hope for from "education" is the ability to think critically.