Fifty years ago, to listen to your favorite song, you had to turn on the radio, wait a bit, and hope it came on, maybe after hearing ten other songs. The cleverest ones armed themselves with a cassette recorder, ready to press ‘record’ to catch that track and be able to listen to it over and over again.
Today, we almost only need to think of something to have it at our fingertips (I don’t know about you, but sometimes it feels like my phone can even read my mind when it shows me ads for things I’ve only thought about. But that’s not philosophy, that’s black magic).
You might say: Great! It saves a lot of time.
But what’s too good to be true, sometimes isn’t true – or rather, it’s true only in part, but there’s a price to pay. The problem with this whole thing is that the price is us.
Let’s rewind from the radio scenario to understand how we’ve gone from being active seekers of things to passive receptors of disconnected information, and how this is making us (at least a little) stupid.
I realized I was paying the price myself when one day, without my phone, I had to “manually” do a slightly harder division than usual and, I’m ashamed to admit, I struggled a bit. We learn divisions in elementary school, but with the calculator always at hand, I hadn’t exercised my brain to do them, so I lost the skill. I had to review something I learned at seven and hadn’t even realized I had lost.
When I was a child, there was a small shop in my town where I went to buy candies, and the lady, who was very old by then, was so used to doing calculations in her head after half a century that she almost never used a calculator (maybe she didn’t even have one).
Let’s transfer this idea to all the areas where technology has invaded our lives: when we need information, we don’t have to read five books to find it, we just click. When we need to talk to someone, instead of exercising patience by going to see them and allowing ourselves time to reflect on the way, we just press a button. Since reading the newspaper is no longer a habit, information is forced into our mouths so quickly that we can’t focus anymore. The trick is now to filter what’s important amidst all the noise, rather than actively searching for quality information.
Every time technology does a task for us, believing we’re saving time, we’re actually losing neural connections. Reading five books to find something, for example, isn’t a waste of time: it’s nourishment for our brain. Mastering patience and using long periods without the anxiety whispering in our ears that time is running out is called serenity. And still being able to focus, while everything around us moves quickly like images in a slot machine, is truly a virtue today.
Believing that technology is neutral or that its value depends solely on how we use it is naive. Every technology transforms the way we perceive and interact with the world: just as the wheel is an extension of our legs, the computer has become an extension, or worse, a replacement, of our brain. These extensions aren’t neutral, but shape our experience of reality. An example was the introduction of television: when it invaded our homes, it didn’t just show us images; it completely recalibrated our view of the world, expanding it far beyond the borders of our neighborhood.
And if we consider that humans naturally tend towards energy saving, in the absence of a real need, we prefer to delegate (most students, for example, would have an AI write their essay instead of writing it themselves). So, a computer doesn’t just make life easier for us, but imposes certain habits, delegating tasks that were once solely our responsibility.
As McLuhan wrote, the content is like the steak the thief waves in front of the guard dog to sneak into the house. The media are not just a source of information; they also shape the thinking process.
Being aware of this is already a huge step to prevent our brains from atrophying, especially now that artificial intelligence is becoming smarter than us.
