Your brain on tech

I had a class the other day where the professor asked us to close our laptops and use pen and paper. It was probably because he was sick of people using Twitter, sending e-mail, checking Facebook. I must admit, it felt a little weird to try to listen and hand-write at the same time. After a couple of years of using my laptop to take notes, I had gotten used to being able to quickly tab over to Wikipedia and look up a name or concept that I wasn’t familiar with.

These brief glances enrich my learning experience: it really helps you understand a professor’s offhand reference to Bush needing to undergo a Nuremburg-like experience if you remember what Nuremburg was. In today’s interdisciplinary, hypertextual academic world, having online references is like having an expanded memory of things you never studied, a kind of déjà vu that breathes life into the details. Not having it would be like learning about hyperbolas without a graphing calculator: definitely possible, but you’d be at a serious disadvantage to all those kids who think T.I. stands for “Texas Instruments.”

But then again, I’ve met math teachers who think kids shouldn’t have calculators so they learn to understand the “trick” of a problem, instead of using a single method to brute-force it. I’ve met English teachers who think kids should write things by hand so they get the experience of drafting and editing. I’ve met film teachers who think kids should cut and paste real film so they learn to storyboard and visualize.

So is it right to hold me back by making me use yesterday’s tools? My generation is often cited as lazy, entitled, and ADD by previous generations, who blame our perceived moral decrepitude on the influx of technology. There might seem to be merit to their argument that technology makes us over-reliant on shortcuts. Why should we learn multiplication when there are calculators that can get you the answer instantly?

This is the argument that our technology amps us up so we can get intellectual muscle without going to the gym, painting technology as a mash-up of steroids, malevolent genies, and the Pied Piper. This is an oversimplification, and a failure of imagination. By removing the burden of mental menial tasks, we gain time, energy and effort that can be used to do other things. Our technology is not a drug or parasite, but a symbiote. Technology liberates us from having to worry about rote details like memorization and calculation. Machines can already do this better than we can; why shouldn’t we focus on creativity and innovation instead?

The answer is obvious, of course: look at any big lecture hall and you’ll see hundreds of students using their tech-enabled creativity to play Farmville or Gchat about their latest Loko binge. Would those students be behaving any differently without technology to distract and amuse them? Some professors seem to think so. The question, much like in the gun-control debate, comes down to whether the tool or its user is responsible for the negative consequences of the tool’s use.

I’m pro-technology. As a writer, I don’t think I would be able to fulfill my potential if I had to constantly worry about flipping through dictionaries and spilling White-Out. I can focus on my ideas, not putting down the words that express those ideas. But then, I wrote this column while streaming the big game in the background, so maybe I’m a little biased.

Harrison Lee is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Monday.