Via Boing Boing

Earlier this year, I simultaneously read Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget and Steven B. Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You, and found it, as you can imagine, confounding. Lanier argues that digital technology is reductive of human intelligence and stunts innovation (because of short-sighted design which results in technological “lock-in” and subsequent “sedimentation,” described as “when digital representations of ideas become causal forces in the evolution of those ideas.” Meanwhile “blue skies” Johnson argues that our engagement with technology (e.g., video games) raises IQ scores and develops cognitive abilities that can’t be learned from books. I find myself firmly rooted in both camps, despite their contradictory arguments. My work as an artist and curator takes full advantage of the speed and efficiency provided by the internet’s “hive mind,” but I am also acutely aware of the limitations and lightweight quality of research and communication that takes place exclusively online. This topic has been poured over in books like The Shallows by Nicholas G. Carr and a tsunami of newspaper and magazine stories about how the internet is making us stupid, distracted, fragmented, smarter, more productive, and friendlier. Read the rest of this post on my Glasstire blog, We Have The Technology.