Pinked by Technology

What does a drop of technology in our society do?

‘The Internet is the most widespread and rapidly adopted technology in the history of humanity.’ 

Opening sentence, Firth et. al, 2019.

If we put a drop of red color in a glass of clear water, it will float for a while.

While it floats we can track its movement. That one red drop that slowly winds its way to the bottom of the glass.

But what happens if we leave the glass to itself and return after an hour?

We will not see that drop anymore.

Instead, we will find a glass filled with red or pink water, depending on the concentration of the color we added, in proportion to the amount of water.

This image that I read about in the preface of “Amusing Ourselves to Death’ by Prof. Neil Postman, about how technology blends in our lives till we become inseparable from it, has stayed in my mind. 

I have used this image to explain to students, how use of any technology, app, or even a simple machine on a regular basis gradually rewires our brains. As the use gets normalised it changes the character of society by altering the way things are done i.e. our relation to the world around us and with each other.

Techno-determinism is the name for a set theories that propose that as use of technology progresses, it changes both social structure and cultural values¹ of its host society.

Broadly, the concept implies that because each technology has its biases² the most used technology will decide the fate of a society.

Leaning on any one ‘form of communication’ will tilt the host society towards the biases of that technology. The ‘inherent structure’ of each technology determines what content it favors. Hence the concern of parents and educators about extreme focus on audio-visual learning at the expense of reading.

Books promote literacy, TVs (or shall we say screens that feature audio-visual content) promote visual learning. Both literacies encourage unique ways of interacting with the information around us.

(Did you ever want to hit CTRL + F, when you lost something?).

There is a marked difference between way our brain is engaged while using print, audio or audio-visual.

Because print, audio and audio-visual engage us in different ways, only a balance of their use can ensure a wholesome development of our mental faculties.

Literacy of the written word (print); ability to make sense of long passages just by listening (with or without sound effects) and creating images in our mind (audio); and the easiest of them all, the audio-visual engaging both eyes and the ears simultaneously³.

In short, once a technology is introduced, it changes the way we conduct business, both public and private.

Take for example, the printing press. Imagine the state of ‘contracts’ before the ease of printing it out on paper? Creating books? Storing books?

I understand scribes wrote complicated texts by hand that took years to finish. The final versions of handwritten Bibles were chained to the desks so that they could not be taken far from where they were stored. 

Compare that to kindle. One can easily carry 1500 books at in a tablet, lighter than a paper-bound notebook. I heard Prof. Negroponte talk about this revolution in his Keynote in the late 1990s, at the International Conference for Distance Education.

‘Each child will carry a library.’

Whether or not we read all the books downloaded on Kindle, the ability to carry a library in our bags has untold possibilities⁴.

Writing by hand helps us remember the material better than typing. When reading on screen, scholars suggest it with taking notes by hand for best results. Image Credit: Shutter Stock

Yet, it is important to note that even reading, though generally better for memory than consuming audio-visual content, works better in print than on screen.

Text goes into short term memory; visuals go directly into long term memory. Not only does our brain process visuals faster, it also retains them longer than texts. Audio-visuals come with many details—sound, color, lighting, framing etc. and therefore are much more information intensive that plain black and white text.

However, we remember better when we write by hand, as opposed to typing⁵.

Prof. Audrey van der Meer has found that learning is more effective when combined with hand-writing. Meer, a professor of neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has found that there is strong difference in brain activity when hand writing as opposed to typing. Although brain patterns when drawing and writing by hand match closer than those when typing.

Text no matter how detailed relies on our mind’s ability to create images implied by the text. Reading text is laborious, while audio-visual is immersive. Reading on printed paper helps you remember information better as opposed to reading on screen. One of the reasons  for better memory for reading on print than on screen is that we are more likely to multitask when consuming audio-visual content, than if we are reading print.

While both printed word and audiovisual content are in abundance, it is the audio-visual content which is the main culprit behind information overload. It comes to us without asking and we consume it without any thought or effort.

Take a few seconds to think about this. And consider the impact of screen culture on us.

How many screens have you encountered since you woke up today?

Flowering of a Civilization

There is some truth to the concerns about decline of civilization being linked to excessive focus on the audio-visual.

Harold Innis, the Canadian scholar whose works influenced Marshall McLuhan of the ‘Medium is the Message’ fame, stated that ‘flowering’ of any civilization happens when all available media are used in a balance.’

Meaning the use of print, audio, audio-visual is equally common. One is not sacrificed for the other.

Ideally, both at individual and societal level.

Drops of Technology

Imagine then a red drop of technology being released into a society.

And then another, and one after another…

A drop of print, that allows documents to be carried far.

A drop of audio, which allows you to continue chopping vegetables as you listen, essentially giving simultaneous tasks to your brain. Or replacing your own inner thoughts with the voice on radio.

And a drop of audio-visual which can demand your ultimate attention, and imprint visuals on your psyche. Think of the images and stories that get repeated today.

Financial crisis, murders, wars, climate catastrophes, and some love stories too.

Then think of the screens these stories can be told at.

TV, computer, phone, wrist-watches,

And then think of how many places we encounter these screens?

Homes, offices, buses, airplanes, buses, stores and malls…

We have now moved from the initial freedom of multi-tasking to being walled-in, as there are no places where electronic-screens are not. 

Multitasking does not lead to productivity. Image Credit: Shutter Stock

Impact of Focus on a Specific mode for learning & Communication:

Once ‘pinked’ by technology, there is no way a society can return to clear water.

We will never know the value of clear water, or how it tasted or even fathom the clarity of vision seeing through ‘clear water’. We may, however, find ways to re-create for brief periods the essence of ‘clear water’ through expensive retreats that force us to drop media-use for a few days.

Once introduced, technology itself undergoes changes, often responding to the needs of the users (it’s not a service/charity, but simply a dictate of the user/market. Although updating/upgrading technology is considered ‘research’ no technology will survive for long without its use/rs. It is the use of a technology that determines whether or not it will stay. If there is no profit for the makers, the technology will be discontinued).

As people start to use them, tiny but incremental changes are made to accommodate a gadget’s use. Accessories that go with the technology start to be invented.

Before someone thought to put page numbers on the books, people used fingers dipped in ink to flip the pages as a markerof how far they’d read. Surely bookmarks were created with the same idea, and were considered a useful gift. 

The concept of remote for television became inevitable with proliferation of TV channels. It was accompanied by invention of other technologies like recording TV content for later viewing, followed by gadgets that record sans ads for a shorter playback time.

For now, let us not talk about the garbage we have generated (old VCR players, cassettes, CDs……) in the last five decades.

Slowly new technology becomes old, newer technologies flood in at a faster pace without us realizing what are losing (We talk more about what we gain e.g. speed, connectivity etc. The focus on advantages of a technology always benefits the creators).

Gaining one skill while losing another

For me, being ‘pinked’ by technology began when I started graduate school in the US. Although my background was in semi-sciences, all my assignments were hand written. The files for experiments/practicals were maintained by hand, until the undergraduate. Longer assignments were typed by me or a hired help. 

I had seen a computer, even taken a short course in programming, but my computer use even in the early nineties was restricted to playing games. Professors in the US refused to accept hand written assignments, and that put me on a new path. 

One that I loved very much, at first, even though it was challenging. 

It allowed me speed. 

The fact that pre-windows computer use required basic commands to operate made it seem as if I was interacting (if not controlling) this entity called ‘computer’. While I wrote hundreds of hand-written letters before that (just love to write), now I could work on multiple letters, articles, poems and return to them at convenience.

It was magic to see the keys that I tapped on the keyboard pop-up as words and turn into sentences on the screen. 

I could use backspace, bold, italics- none of which I could do while writing by hand. 

The freedom!

Until it wasn’t. 

Projects began to be saved on files long before they were well formed. Many of them would not be visited for months or years to come, because there was always new information to read and ‘save.’

I always loved words and knew the power they held over me.

But it was when I started using computers that I got greedy, reckless and therefore restless with and around words.

A frenzy took over.

I had to capture, write, save.

Waltzing with memory, an interesting, fun exercise, reduced drastically.

Before I used computers, if a sentence (or many) came to mind, I played with words in different ways to hold and shape, till I was close to a pen and paper and jotted it down. In the meantime the words and ideas stewed in their own juice.

Computers taught me that I did not need to hold it in my head for long. That words in my head could be dumped onto a machine, before they had marinated in context and purpose. With that I lost an important ability.

To be able to write an essay in one sitting.

I think the last time I experienced the richness of examining an idea from various angles before writing it, was in Advanced Media Writing class. Prof. Art Barlow gave us on-the-spot-writing assignments, ‘recreate a place you visited this summer, narrate a person you met this summer’.

We were given twenty minutes to write on the spot. 

I wrote about something that I had been thinking about for a few weeks.

‘You wrote that in class?’ Prof. Barlow said in a tone that sounded positive. 

Referring to the university newspaper he asked, ‘Want to get it published in the Clarion Call?’

I nodded, even though I was thinking, ‘Is it worthy?”

Consider this.

Not only did the assignment require thinking and writing, but it had to be legible to be graded. Writing by hand develops fine motor skills. While typing our fingers just ‘tap’, whereas to write on a paper one needs to hold a pen/cil, which involves coordination of small muscles and movements of the hands, fingers, and eyes, as we try to write in a straight line, with or without ruled paper.  

The article was about Mr. Olsen whom I had met that summer. I wrote by hand, from emotion, honesty and care. (I will share the article here at some point). 

A three page article, written on the spot without any spelling mistakes. It was grammatically sound and needed no edits, except minor modifications with ‘the articles^’ and punctuation, that I continue to have issues with⁶.

Today that sounds unbelievable.

Like science fiction. 

When typing I make spelling mistakes, even though I type fast.

But not a single spelling mistake when I am writing by hand.

Our English teachers in India trained us, via weekly ‘dictation lessons and spelling tests.’ Until spellings came to us like breathing. I intuitively knew when I was not doing it right, and would course correct.

There were two kinds of assignments in all language classes we had to take: Hindi, English and Sanskrit.

Dictation and ‘using a word’ in a sentence.

For dictation the teacher would read a paragraph and we had to jot it down simultaneously, almost at the same speed as it was being spoken. For the other assignment, we were given words that we had to create sentences out of, to demonstrate that we understood the meaning.

Print, audio, and comprehension, all wrapped in one assignment.

Different with computer though.

When software points out spelling errors it’s not important to learn spellings.

In the first years of using computers I created several documents. The freedom of leaving the work incomplete created a different pathway in my mind. A new way of thinking. I did not need to have a fully formed idea to begin my projects. 

It sounded like freedom.

Only it wasn’t.

It was an illusion. I got caught in the tyranny of WIP: Works in Progress.

And lost hold over an important skill while gaining prowess over another.

Daily writing habit was sidelined. Typing became the norm. I even maintained a computer journal for a while.

Today, I doubt I can write a ready-to-publish article by hand, in 20 minutes.

Interestingly, I still keep in touch with Mr. Olsen, the subject of that handwritten essay. Most of our communication over the years has been via hand written letters and phone calls. 

The way real friends are made.

In long form communication.

Compare that to texting, which mostly lends itself towards casual conversations. Often ideas jump over each other and the connecting thread is lost.

Phones and Screens Everywhere

Currently India boasts 700 million smart phones in use. Ownership of 300 million smart phones in the US means nearly100% penetration. Results of walking with mini computers with flashy screens are visible in a general decrease in concentration levels around the world.  

This post is neither to create nostalgia about the old days nor to generate a sense of doom for the future. But to bring to our attention three points.

1. One form of communication (audio-visual) dominates presently.

2. Reading text- writing by hand have benefits that should be retained.

3.     We have agency.

4.     We can build exercises in schools and homes to create our mini-pushbacks to the domination of the audio-visual.

Here are a few ways to slow down if not reverse, ‘being pinked’ by technology.

Writing habit. A few words every day.  

Create a journal. It does not have to be ‘personal’. Instead it can be reflective. You can write/reflect on

world events

document the lives of your children

a hobby

things you want to give thanks for. Keep a gratitude journal (my favorite). It feels good while writing and even better when reading it back.

You can start with being grateful for being literate, for the ability to read and write.

Educators, Parents and Grandparents. Can create ‘dictation’ games with children. Some suggestions

How fast can they write, without spelling mistakes (use a stop watch)

Can they ‘hear’ punctuation? (commas, exclamation marks, full stops?).

How well do they stick to the lines on ruled paper

Foreign films

Choose to watch films that are not in your native language so you have to read the subtitles. You will have to watch the same movie several times to thoroughly enjoy what the director was trying to do. Just reading, just watching and finally going back and forth between reading and enjoying the language of camera. Oh, and you will also enjoy ‘foreign music’.

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Some links and Studies

https://www.iow.nhs.uk/Childrens-Therapies/Childrens-OT/Handwriting-and-fine-motor-skills NHS

Hardy, Rich (Oct, 2020). EEG study finds brain activity differences between handwriting and typing: https://newatlas.com/science/brain-activity-differences-handwriting-drawing-typing/ in New Atlas.

Firth, J., Torous, J., Stubbs, B., Firth, J. A., Steiner, G. Z., Smith, L., ... & Sarris, J. (2019). The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry, 18(2), 119-129.

Lauren M. Singer & Patricia A. Alexander (2017) Reading Across Mediums: Effects of Reading Digital and Print Texts on Comprehension and Calibration, The Journal of Experimental Education, 85:1, 155-172, DOI: 10.1080/00220973.2016.1143794

Smoker, T. J., Murphy, C. E., & Rockwell, A. K. (2009, October). Comparing memory for handwriting versus typing. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 53, No. 22, pp. 1744-1747). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.

Sundar, S. S., Narayan, S., Obregon, R., & Uppal, C. (1998). Does Web advertising work? Memory for print vs. online media. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 75 (4), 822-835.

Van der Meer, A. L., & van der Weel, F. R. (2017). Only three fingers write, but the whole brain works†: a high-density EEG study showing advantages of drawing over typing for learning. Frontiers in psychology, 706. Chicago

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism

2. Although he focusses more on changes in human behavior due to introduction of electronic environments, Prof. Joshua Meyrowitz, adds another layer by emphasizing that each technology by its presence restructures our core relationship with each other and our concept of ‘being’ --

‘…new media transform the home and other social spheres into new social environments with new patterns of social action, feeling and belief.’ Meyrowitz’s seminal book, ‘No Sense of Place’ (1985), p. 15

3. Although it can be argued that non-linear storytelling that employs complex ways of packing information requires a ‘new kind’ of literacy.

4. I will concede to all the pessimists--Yes, most of us will never read all that we buy on kindle.

5. Singer Trakham and Mangen

6. As much as I write in English, I continue to have problems with ‘definitive’. It is a common issue with many who use Asian languages, many of which do not use the ‘absolute’. There is no ‘The King’. But ‘A King.’

That house, this plate, a cat. No, the house, the plate, the cat. Although thinking patterns are converging due to access to global media and information, these linguistic markers are also indicative of how certain cultures think. Language is both a generator and a result of a culture, a mind-set.