Leaving knowledge to the Internet

Marshall McLuhan, as I’ve noted before, wrote about how technology creates what he called “extensions of man.” The car is an extension of the foot, the telephone is an extension of the voice, the radio is an extension of the ear.

The internet is turning out to be an extension of the collective memory. That’s good and bad. We have come to rely on the Web as a ready source of information, but it has also become a reason not to retain knowledge personally. If some fact is a click or two away, why do we have to remember it?

I sense that I am experiencing this approach to knowledge with my students. They assimilate less and less because they know that it is readily available to them on-line. The result is that if you ask them a question and they don’t have ready access to their Internet “memory chips,” they draw a blank. Carried to its extreme, they are prevented from thinking on their own without the aid of their computers.

Mark Bauerlein, in his book “The Dumbest Generation, (How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future)” concludes, “The Dumbest Generation cares little for history books, civic principles, foreign affairs, comparative religions, and serious media and art, and it knows less.”

I disagree that the “Millennial Generation,” as it has been called, “cares little” about the above. They DO care, sometimes passionately, but because of their reliance on the Internet, they haven’t absorbed knowledge about their concerns, and so can’t and don’t converse readily about them.

In a sense they are literally “dumb.” They can’t speak for their lack of assimilated knowledge.