http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2010/06/08/our-gadgets-are-changing-our-brains-and-not-for-the-better Comments On: Our Gadgets Are Changing Our Brains, and Not for the Better by Jonny Diamond en-us Copyright 2013 The L Magazine. All rights reserved. This RSS file is offered to individuals, The L Magazine readers, and non-commercial organizations only. Any commercial websites wishing to use this RSS file, please contact The L Magazine. editor@thelmagazine.com (The L Magazine Webmaster) Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:01 -0400 Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400 Foundation http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss These are all fair points I largely agree with... I'm honestly not all that optimistic, but want to avoid the panicked chicken-littling of the generation in the middle of a sea-change.
Posted by Jonny Diamond]]> Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:53:13 -0400 The L Magazine
It's not merely a matter of length, I should clarify, it's more about concentration and appreciation for nuance. As I've said before, I marvel at language's capacity to convey shades of meaning, but feel pretty strongly that "our gadgets" aren't really conducive to that kind of reading.

Most new media have made us much smarter, socially--we pick up cues better, I think, and are more capable of reading visual and contextual connotations, and so on.
Posted by Mark Asch]]> Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:39:25 -0400 The L Magazine Well, as I said, I think this change hasn't been great for those of us in the really stark, transitional period (moving from linear, pre-digital ways of learning and processing info to multifaceted, simultaneous processing): We're less happy, more stressed out, etc., but that's mainly because we (the Transitionals) are kind of like guinea pigs. I think it's really impossible to say what moral/civic paradigms will emerge with the first fully digital generation (I think it's a bit facile to equate the length of an argument with its moral depth—in fact, there are some ethical philosophers who suggest the longer it takes to "explain" morality, the more dubious it is.)

Further to this, there's also the philosophical notion—with regards to civic morality—that civilization and morality were born from ever-decreasing ideas of "Them," concomitant to ever-increasing ideas of "Us," a ratio surely helped by the connectivity of the Internet.
Posted by Jonny Diamond]]> Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:06:19 -0400 The L Magazine Posted by Eyeball Kid]]> Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:27:59 -0400 The L Magazine
You could just as easily argue (with no evidence) that gadgets are increasing the ability to think laterally, and to investigate more deeply into concepts and issues.
Posted by peterpiper]]> Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:12:00 -0400 The L Magazine
My attention span has gotten worse since I started blogging regularly, and for all the virtues of reactivity, and associativeness, and multi-input juggling, a brain that can't stick with a long argument portends largely negative outcomes intellectually, civically, morally...
Posted by Mark Asch]]> Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:24:02 -0400 The L Magazine I like your angle in that piece, but I think you're placing too much emphasis on evolution as opposed to local adaption.

I'm not talking about hundreds of generations of evolved hardwiring, I'm talking about the kind of short-term, local neural changes that occur over weeks and months...
Posted by Jonny Diamond]]> Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:04:01 -0400 The L Magazine Posted by TBilich]]> Tue, 08 Jun 2010 12:11:17 -0400 The L Magazine