Benoit Georges the French journalist and head of Innovations and Skills department with Les Echos has published an article on Worldcrunch titled ‘Do Smart Phones Make Us Dumber? Asking The Internet's Intelligence Questions’. Georges states “Italian linguist Raffaele Simone and French philosopher Jean-Michel Besnier deliver very different views on the matter. According to Simone, modern men and women are “caught in the Web,” absorbed in the “media sphere”, which he describes as an “environment in which online electronic media play a fundamental role,” and create, “from nothing, trends, needs and new pressures.” …Written knowledge allows thoughts to be structured and more complex than oral communications. It is based on a specific form of intelligence Simone called “sequential” – meaning the way we assimilate new information, one after the other. The Web and videos, on the other hand, favor a “simultaneous” form of intelligence – we are capable of taking in different types of information at the same time but without “being able to put them in order as a logical succession, with hierarchy.” …Jean-Michel Besnier’s … asks a simple question: “How does the cultured species that we are, born from the Age of Enlightenment and having witnessed totalitarianism, let itself become a slave to its machines?” The situations in which we delegate our responsibility to objects or programs are multiplying: Search engines algorithms decide which websites best match our needs; the so called “service” robots that are supposed to take better care than us of the elderly or autistic children; the GPS navigators without which we are completely lost… Besnier believes this dehumanization existed long before computers. According to him, the industrial revolution – that transformed men into operators of machines that were more powerful than them – was already part of this movement.”   Inspired by Benoit Georges, Worldcrunch ow.ly/gH0mm Image source Twitter ow.ly/gH0kW Do smart phones make us dumber? (January 16 2013)

Benoit Georges the French journalist and head of Innovations and Skills department with Les Echos has published an article on Worldcrunch titled ‘Do Smart Phones Make Us Dumber? Asking The Internet’s Intelligence Questions’. Georges states “Italian linguist Raffaele Simone and French philosopher Jean-Michel Besnier deliver very different views on the matter. According to Simone, modern men and women are “caught in the Web,” absorbed in the “media sphere”, which he describes as an “environment in which online electronic media play a fundamental role,” and create, “from nothing, trends, needs and new pressures.” …Written knowledge allows thoughts to be structured and more complex than oral communications. It is based on a specific form of intelligence Simone called “sequential” – meaning the way we assimilate new information, one after the other. The Web and videos, on the other hand, favor a “simultaneous” form of intelligence – we are capable of taking in different types of information at the same time but without “being able to put them in order as a logical succession, with hierarchy.” …Jean-Michel Besnier’s … asks a simple question: “How does the cultured species that we are, born from the Age of Enlightenment and having witnessed totalitarianism, let itself become a slave to its machines?” The situations in which we delegate our responsibility to objects or programs are multiplying: Search engines algorithms decide which websites best match our needs; the so called “service” robots that are supposed to take better care than us of the elderly or autistic children; the GPS navigators without which we are completely lost… Besnier believes this dehumanization existed long before computers. According to him, the industrial revolution – that transformed men into operators of machines that were more powerful than them – was already part of this movement.”

 

Inspired by Benoit Georges, Worldcrunch ow.ly/gH0mm Image source Twitter ow.ly/gH0kW