Media and technology have gained so much, almost too much, importance in our lives in the past 10 years. My point: we are losing things in the learning process, and there are shifts in our society today that may be causing people to become more stupid, for lack of a better word. People's IQ's today are on average 14 points lower than back in the Victorian Era,to put that in perspective thats the about the difference between Albert Einstein (160 IQ) and your "average" MENSA member (135), with an average drop 1.23 points every year. I have a feeling that in the coming years with certain advancements in technology, this statistic is only going to get worse.
Our attention spans nowadays are now shorter than that of a goldfish. My suspicion for this statistic is because apps such as Vine and Snapchat. Both of these entities have to do with time. A vine lasts at most six seconds, and a single snapchat lasts at most 10 seconds. And I don't know about you, but I find myself sometimes not even watching the whole snapchat or vine. That's right, sometimes I can't even pay attention to something for 10 whole seconds. I am sure I am not the only one this applies to. Yes, it could be because I may not find the material interesting, or I get everything that's going on but still, come on, 10 seconds! That's ridiculous. I am ashamed of myself for this, but it is true nonetheless.
Because of all this, we are paying less and less attention in school, and we aren't learning as much as we could. Technology and social media are ruining us in my opinion. Yes, it has its place in our lives, but there is too heavy a reliance on it in this day in age. Not to say it is a totally bad thing, we are just in a time of transition, I feel. No one before us has had such an influx of technology so readily available to them. We need to learn to adapt and continue to be productive people.
When we raise our kids, we are going to have a huge adjustment. Personally I was not raised on much technology, definitely not the technology we have now. We as parents are going to need to learn how to raise our kids the right way with elements of their childhood and ours. I hope we never have to see a society that is totally reliant on technology for communication, friendship, and anything else. Our generation is a very important place, in my mind, and people need to know the important of where they stand, yet also know how to effect change in today's world.
What I mean by all of this is that we need to get away from certain technologies. Things like Google, various translators, online simulations, and many other things are taking away from the learning process. Many things that we "learn" are just Googled, this does not warrant the retention of knowledge, which then causes our intelligence to go down. Technology has its place today, and will continue to, but how we use it can possible changed the course of our intelligence.
