Is Information Making Us Dumber?

A friend on Twitter provided a link to this very interesting Globe and Mail article entitled, "Information-Rich and Attention-Poor". It covers many of the side effects of the increasingly fast-and-easy access to data that technology is enabling and the effect it's having on our attention span, including the undeniable movement away from depth, in favour of speed.

I can certainly see that with some of the students I tutor. Kids with reading comprehension issues, for example, are now so used to skimming content that they often can't recount any more than a few points about what they just read even seconds after finishing the piece in question. I didn't fully recognize the extent of the problem until I asked one student to read the passage aloud to me - up to that point, I'd naively had him read it silently to himself - and noticed two things right off the bat:

• he was reading very quickly and skipping (or misidentifying) some of the words; and
• he was reading without much tonal differences from word to word.

The first point wasn't that surprising, because it had been somewhat deducible by the short time that the student had spent silently reading before saying that he was done. But the flat intonation in the reading, which I'd describe as "word word word word word word" (meaning that all words were simply read as individual entities, with no particular vocal inflections or emphasis being applied to key portions as one would do when telling a story). In the Information Age, this makes a certain amount of sense: all data is relatively equal, especially in a child's mind, unless something especially noteworthy differentiates it, such as the name of a celebrity or the mention of a favourite character or hobby. In other words, some young readers today may be racing through the paragraphs, searching (often in vain) for the one or two buzzwords that interest them. In fact, the # 1 reason I get from students when they're quizzed about their low retention is that what they were asked to read "was boring."

In my Math tutoring, I'm also finding that some of what previous generations considered basic knowledge has fallen by the wayside. I've had teenagers say, "I don't need to know my times tables because I can just plug the question into my calculator." I remember hearing that for the first time when our daughter was young. Fortunately for her, we didn't buy the argument then, and I still don't buy it today. Another friend of mine recounted the story to me of having a Grade 2 or 3 teacher who set up a series of workstations for his class, at which the students would find worksheets with basic single digit operations on them (eg. "3 + 6" or "7 x 9"). Each successive station used larger numbers, and every day each child would attempt to complete the worksheet there in 3 minutes or less. Successful completion (with no errors) allowed the student to progress to the next station the following day. Using this sort of approach, most of the members of that class became "unconsciously competent" at basic arithmetic. At the end of re-telling this to me, the friend pointed out that in high school and university, he and his former classmates would inevitably spend less time on the rudimentary portions of every test question and therefore have more time to spend on the parts that required actual exploration and discovery.

And that's a key point in this discussion, I think. If the faster pace of life today means that individuals aren't getting even the basic foundations of knowledge by the time they graduate from school, then it seems inevitable that we'll actually regress at some point. As the Globe and Mail article above mentions, we'll have unlimited access to existing knowledge but very limited capability at generating any new wisdom. Expertise - meaning deep, thorough understanding of a topic - had better not fall out of fashion, or we'll undoubtedly face stagnation in the future. As a Math Tutor, I'm doing my part to fight this trend.