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Masters of the new world

Is technology, meant to make us smarter by making information from around the world available to us at the push of a button, actually dumbing us down?

PHOTO: BLOOMBERG

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 reciting his entire Shakespeare from memory. Gasp! Or someone reeling off T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party without even a stealthy glance at the text even as you desperately rummage through the book trying to catch up. Epic memory? Certainly. Or, if you are a child of the Internet-ipod age, you could damn the person as belonging to Stone Age. Imagine taxing your brains when all information you need is available at the click of a mouse. I, for one, would want to look at this is as more than just exceptional memory power.

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 total recall. It is supreme irony that the lady considers herself technologically challenged, fumbles about with her cellphone and looks nervously at her upgraded PC.

At the press of a button

But to put her bemused and tech-savvy friends at ease the dudette decided to speak a colossal truth on what the Internet had done to her: the eminently memorable lines of Khalil Gibran, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, which she in her glorious days of self-reliance could recall from those sparkling corners of her brain, are now beckoned with the click of a button even by her!

Just when the dudette was lamenting the loss of a past when she was far less parasitic, she stumbled upon Jackie Ashley who wrote in The Guardian on how memory, once built up in a verbal and reading culture, matters less when everything can be summoned at the touch of a button. She couldn't agree more. The fact that the world's knowledge is at your "beck and call" is certainly enticing. But does this world, burdened with gadgets and gizmos, dampen our drive to remember anything at all?

Clinical Professor Richard Restak in his article 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, cellphones, email 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. With this change, Prof. Restak thinks that brain is being forced to manage a bulk of information in intervals that are constantly shrinking.

In fact, researchers at the University of California have this startling spill, which says that the information published in the world has tripled in the last decade. It is now about 800 megabytes of information produced for every man, woman and child on the planet. To put it in simple terms, it is the equivalent of 10,000 A4 pages each.

For a world that's on the move, gadgets have come as a big boon. It's no longer a daunting task to get in touch with your friend who has gone off to the ice fields of Antartica. If you work in crazy shifts and don't have the time to invite people over for a weekend bash you've been planning, all you need to do is send out a common SMS.

Even as you put out this long list of advantages, you know that technology has changed the notion of intelligence. The world knows only too many who earned the label "good worker" before being overwhelmed by technology and soon dubbed "useless".

"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. True of the times that he is born into, he loves gadgets and gizmos. He loves surfing the Net. In fact, it is there that he reads up for his school assignments. Books are only the next option. "Video games are my favourite pastime. Not that I don't love books... ," he trails off, undecidedly. Isn't that testimony enough to signify, as Jackie Ashley put it, that "we have slipped away from a culture based essentially on words to one based essentially on images or pictures"?

And one chit of a three-year-old told the gobsmacked dudette in no uncertain terms that he likes Noddy on television more than in a book "because his car doesn't move in the book"!

Summing it up, photojournalist K. Gopinathan says: "In the past, we made mistakes, learnt from them, and perfected our art. But in this new world of technology, there is no room for mistakes. The machine achieves perfection for you while you can continue to remain half-baked." He remembers the years he toiled over the study of light, theory of photography, the various kinds of lenses... all redundant in the present times. "Now, the man behind the camera is only incidental."

Pathologist Anuradha Vivek doesn't feel any different even as she has personal favourites among the many offspring of technology. 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. However, the jingoistic cheers to technology almost drown these feeble voices of anxiety.

Before the Net

Short-story writer S. Diwakar would agree with that. He harks back to a time when there was no Internet, not even a surplus of books, but still managed to produce some of the greatest scholars of all times. The great Kannada poet D.V. Gundappa, the learned D.L. Narasimhachar and the extraordinary journalist P.K. Srinivasan were remarkable knowledge centres. "Then, the pursuit of knowledge was never seen as a profit-making venture. Why hasn't this information age produced a single DVG or DLN, while it should have logically produced many of each of them?" asks Diwakar. The Google search engine is sure to throw up hundreds of essays on "Blood", but the image of blood that sticks is 13-year-old Janaki dying of blood cancer in Yashwant Chittala's Kannada short story. "Information has to become a part of your experience. It becomes knowledge only when it translates into a metaphor," observes Diwakar.

Technology has sure changed our dudette's life too. For one, the notion of private space is fast fading. She can no longer listen to her favourite music or get lost in that new book or pamper the champak plant that has just burst into buds or have an uninterrupted chat with friends. For, the microwave beeps, the mobile screams, the washing machine says it's done, and the computer says there's a mail...

DEEPA GANESH

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