The latest installment in how technology is ruining our brains comes from The New York Times. In typical fashion, the Times takes an example of an extremely wired family to talk about recent research that shows excessive multitasking is bad for us, that technology is addictive, and that it can erode our traditional social structures, like family life. The subject of the profile, Kord Campbell (his given name was Thomas), is so obsessed with his iPhone it causes familial "strife" when they're on vacation. He knows exactly how many seconds he'll be offline when his train goes through a tunnel.
The problem, as if often pointed out, is that we've heard all this before. Vaughan Bell pointed this out in Slate in February:
These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself. In parallel with modern concerns about children's overuse of technology, Socrates famously warned against writing because it would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories." He also advised that children can't distinguish fantasy from reality, so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not "improper" tales, lest their development go astray. The Socratic warning has been repeated many times since: The older generation warns against a new technology and bemoans that society is abandoning the "wholesome" media it grew up with, seemingly unaware that this same technology was considered to be harmful when first introduced.
It's not that the travails of the Campbell family aren't real; it's that there's nothing particularly unique or new about them, though the way they manifest themselves might be. All that remains to be seen is what the next bad technology will be.
-- Monica Potts
