This is your brain on technology!

by | Monday, February 07, 2011

May years ago I wrote an essay titled On becoming a website. It was about my experience on teaching online and I suggested somewhat facetiously that in order to be a good teacher online I needed to actually “become” the course website! I started the essay by describing the idea of a cyborg:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism — a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. It has been argued that we are all cyborgs now (Haraway, 1991). Be it a pacemaker installed in our hearts or a pair of contact lenses in our eyes, technologies are now an integral part of our bodies and our consciousness. … Of course these socially (and increasingly biologically) embedded technologies often become transparent and, in some sense, so deeply intertwined with our existence that we don’t even realize they exist (Brooks, 2002).

Now this idea of a cyborg was somewhat of a rhetorical move, to generate interest in the topic I was writing about. So imagine my surprise when I read the following paragraph.

They gave her The Device when she was only 2 years old. It sent signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was 7 she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk. By 15 the visions of The Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on the battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit with it, motionless, oblivious to everything around her, for hours on end. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down.

When she grew up, The Device dominated her house: no room was free from it, no activity, not even eating or defecating, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love it was the images of The Device that filled her mind. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if The Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by The Device.

What a terrible terrible story. How and why did the parents give the device to a 2 year old! Is this kind of brain damage reversible?

So what IS this device? Well turns out it is a book!

Go back and read the passage again, making that switch! How does that feel?

I had written earlier about Douglas Adams’ rules about technology

  1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
  2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
  3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.  (p. 95).

It seems to me that this quote, which incidentally is taken from an article in Slate Magazine, reviewing Sherry Turkle’s latest book, captures the manner in which new technologies are often seen to go against “the natural order of things.”

Whether we like it or not, we are all cyborgs now.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Creepy

How do you react to this flash animation? I don't know about you but it completely creeped me out. My reaction is almost visceral in its intensity... It is one thing to read an an article speaking to our fear of snakes and spiders that "Certainly there are certain...

Update V

Here is an email from Rita Selle-Grider, of Young Bright Minds & Inventors Academy. I have spoken about her response (which I admired, contrasting it with some of the other responses I have been getting). I include the complete email below (with her permission). What...

11/26/2008

Mumbai, 11/26/08 Nov. 27: School children hold candles as they pay tribute to the victims of terrorist attacks in Mumbai at a school in Ahmadabad, India, on Thursday. (Photo credit: washingtonpost.com) The last few days have been very strange... dream and nightmare in...

All you can cheat, part II (a response)

Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying: Do you have any words of wisdom or resources on how to create appropriate questions? This sounds great, but easier said than done in my humble opinion. I started...

GenAI Reasoning Models: Very smart & confident (but still drunk)

GenAI Reasoning Models: Very smart & confident (but still drunk)

A year or so ago, I came up with this metaphor that working with a chatbot is like having "a smart, biased, supremely confident, drunk intern." While the bias aspect is a crucial issue I've written about elsewhere, for this discussion we'll focus on the other...

Empathy through gaming: New article

Over the past couple of years my research team (the Deep-Play Research group) and I have been writing an on-going series of articles  around the broad topic of Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century. Published in the journal TechTrends, these...

Contemplating Design: Remixing the 5 spaces framework

Contemplating Design: Remixing the 5 spaces framework

The Five Spaces for Design in Education framework argues that design in education happens in 5 interrelated spaces: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems and culture. We have typically represented this as follows. We, however, are also very aware that any...

Master’s course wins ATT Award

Just got the news from Carrie Albin, Outreach Coordinator of our Educational Technology Certificate Program (which is part of our Master's in Educational Technology program) that our CEP810 (Teaching for Understanding with Computers) course earned first place in the...

Subversion, literacy & TPACK, new article

Kristen Kereluik, Matt Koehler and I just published an article in The California Reader: A publication of the California Reading Association. The complete citation and abstract is as follows: Kereluik, K., Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2010, Winter). On learning...

3 Comments

  1. Bullying Speaker

    The brain is amazing to study. Comparing it to a website reminds me of the ever-changing web. There is no way to fill the internet as our brain will never be full to capacity. Very interesting twist to the paragraphs you posted. We are all cyborgs.

    Reply
  2. Youth Speaker

    Very solid post! Having studied distance learning in my graduate coursework, I can completely understanding “becoming the website” mentality. Once had an instructor tell us that we had to live and breathe the website content as an online instructor.

    Reply
  3. Youth Motivational Speaker

    Funny how the ‘we are all cyborgs’ quote was from 1991. How much more is it the case now, 20 years later!

    I love Adams 3 rules of technology, although it could be argued that numbers need to be adjusted. Thanks for the post!

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Tweets that mention This is your brain on technology! | Punya Mishra's Web -- Topsy.com - [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeroen Bottema, Matthew Krüger-Ross. Matthew Krüger-Ross said: This is your brain on…

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *