
Mind Over Mass Media - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/opinion/11Pinker.html?hp
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psyklic
Who I am worried about are not the superstar scientists, but the masses of
people who become addicted to mass media to the detriment of other parts of
their lives.

>> _If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science
would be plummeting._

Scientists today did not grow up on technology, so I don't think this is a
valid point, until the next generation at least. Also, measuring the "quality
of science" by "discoveries" is poor -- only a few very dedicated (very
anomalous) people make major discoveries.

~~~
alexfarran
The point he's making about scientists is that they use today's technology
right now and it isn't affecting their concentration.

> These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper
> and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to
> intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting.

Yes there are new technological distractions, but they're not qualitatively
different from any other distraction and you deal with them the same way.

You and others speculate that people growing up in todays technological world
will have their intellectual capacity somehow diminished. He points out that
it was ever thus.

> But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were
> accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was
> falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the
> 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of
> television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which
> I.Q. scores rose continuously.

And he goes on to refute some of the basic premises that the "twitter rots
your brain" theory is built on.

Douglas Adams put it in more general terms.

1) Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal.

2) Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 35 is
incredibly exciting and creative and, given opportunity, you can make a career
out of it.

3) Anything that gets invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of
things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s
been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright
really.

