Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Athletes wrestle with this question as a matter of routine. Do the technological aids at their disposal make them better than their predecessors? To take an example,is Usain Bolt,with his habit of breaking the 100m sprint record,greater than Carl Lewis just on that basis? Or can Michael Phelps,with his eight gold medals and almost as many records at the 2008 Olympics,be rightfully acclaimed as the best swimmer ever,better than Mark Spitz,who took home seven golds at the 1972 Games? After all,swimming gear,Olympic pools and nutritional support are far more advantageous to speed today. But the question is not to force a trite comparison but to provoke an examination of the qualities embedded in a new generations appraisal process.
So it is perhaps with an ongoing debate on how the Internet is affecting our intelligence. Two years ago,an article in the Atlantic Monthly pretty much set off a stormy debate on the subject. In Is Google making us stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains,Nicholas Carr argued that the Net is impacting our capacity for deep reading,and by extension concentration and contemplation. With more and more of our reading lives moved online,the temptation to skim,to glide from one thing to another through hyperlinks,our mental circuitry is being reset and this,Carr implied,was not exactly a healthy change.
