KATHERINE ALLEN
Gargoyle senior editor
Posted Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009

YOU'VE ALL HEARD tales of travelers who got stuck on unnavigable back roads or who ended up hundreds of miles off course after blindly following the directions on their global positioning systems. Their unquestioning reliance on technology negated the need to look at actual “ye olde mappes,” or heed roadside warnings.

I yearned for a map at times during my college road trip this past summer. (Unfortunately the maps were stuck in the trunk in a very un-get-at-able spot.) At any given moment I, with the assistance of Maggie (our somewhat-trusty Magellan GPS), could pinpoint my exact coordinates on earth. Sadly, unless I paid attention, I was not always entirely certain which state I was in.

GPS navigation, like any other technology, is quite reliable, so it is easy for us to let our guard down — to let it do all the thinking for us. Sometimes we may lose something in the process. Who still plans a route or bothers to memorize a phone number?

In elementary school I knew my friends’ phone numbers, addresses, and even birthdays off by heart. Apart from a few emergency numbers I no longer make an effort — and why should I? It is right there on my phone. Memorizing this type of information is not really terribly important. The simple fact of memorization, however, is, and any Uni student can tell you that there is plenty of that going on in our daily lives.

Luddites have decried new “tools” since the first workers were displaced by less labor-intensive technologies. Their tendency to expect the worst of every new technology should not alarm us. Yet it is foolish to dismiss their concerns.

Claims like “Google is making us stupid” deserve attention. Supposedly the Internet has changed the way we read — as Nicholas Carr laments, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Apparently old classics like “War and Peace” have become challenging reading because the Internet has dumbed us down. Reading with concentration and contemplation is no longer possible. The Internet seems to have weaned us from that.

Technology and its concurrent ills are more a symptom of the world we live in than a cause of the “decline.” Sure, we rapidly navigate through pages and “randomly” follow links from topic to topic (down the rabbit hole to subjects we would never have dreamt of reading about).

This style may indeed decrease our capacity for concentration and contemplation, but given the vast amount of information available to us, we have to make choices about what we will skim and what we will read in depth.

It’s inevitable that our reading and thinking styles will not be the same as those of readers who lived in an isolated, slow, and less complicated world. Having grown up with the Internet we (my generation) are capable of a “skimming Internet” style of reading as well as “deep 'War and Peace'” style of reading. How many readers from the previous generation can say they read 700-page novels nonstop in their preteens? Being comfortable with both big fat books and the Internet, we actually end up reading more than previous generations.

Technology is a benefit to curious people, since they have tremendous resources at their disposal. People who are too lazy to think will always end up doing something odd or lazy, and technology should not be blamed for it.

An earlier version of this column appeared as an entry in the OG Staff Blog.