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Masters of the new world
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Is technology, meant to make us smarter, dumbing us down?
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ON A DIFFERENT KEY Gadgets have changed our perception of knowledge
"... Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
T.S. Eliot, Choruses From The Rock
Imagine somebody who could remember his entire Shakespeare from memory. Gasp! Or someone who could just walk into the classroom and spool off T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party without having to look. You could for one call it epic memory. Or if you are of the Internet-ipod age, you could damn the person as being from stone-age, fuddy-duddy, or old and foolish.
If you are talking of a phenomenal memory for numbers, then you could count this dudette in. When numbers can be summoned at the push of a button, she still prefers to call upon them from the abyss of the mind.
At the press of a button
But to put them at ease , the dudette decided to speak a colossal truth on what the largesse of this radical phenomenon called Internet had done to her: the eminently memorable lines of Khalil Gibran and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, which the dudette in her glorious days of self-reliance could recall from those sparkling corners of her brain, are now beckoned with the press of a button even by her!
Just when the dudette was lamenting on this, she stumbled upon Jackie Ashley who wrote in The Guardian on how memory matters less when everything can be summoned at the touch of a button. She couldn't agree more. Does this world, overloaded with gadgets and gizmos, dampen our motivation to remember anything at all?
Clinical Professor Richard Restak in his article titled "Mapping the Modern Brain" says that the human brain's organisation and function are literally shifting to adapt to increased demands placed on it by media and technology to include the television, cell phones, e-mail and Internet among others. He says how, driven by technology, the brain has undergone the biggest modification in the last 200,000 years, from that point when the brain volume of the Homo sapiens is said to have reached the modern level.
"You cannot be just good with studies, you have to be good with computers also to be considered intelligent," says Nikhil, a class VIII student.
Pathologist Dr. Anuradha Vivek doesn't feel any different. She sees technology-oriented modern medicine coming as annihilators of all the skills that came with the traditional school.
For instance, a CT scan and X-ray are ordered right away and the time-honoured patient examination skills are getting obsolete. "I see this as a great danger. Machines should only substantiate or confirm our diagnoses," she insists.
Technology has sure changed our dudette's life too. The notion of private space is fast fading. The poor dudette has found a way out: she has decided to make Internet the presiding deity of her life!
DEEPA GANESH
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