Does digital technology make students stupid? That’s what a 2019 BigThink article asks. I like to read Big Think, but it seems like PopScience in a negative way—like Pop Psychology. It’s not necessarily directionally wrong. It’s just oversimplified and seeks the lowest common denominator.

On this topic, Plato quipped, voicing Socrates, in his Phædrus 14 dialogue except that his quip was relative to writing and memory. Some historians and Classicists have suggested that modern readers may be missing the satire. I’m no defender of human intelligence, but this is the demise of society because of change—whether due to writing, radio, television, computers, video games, mobile devices, and whatever comes up next.

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Plato – Dialogue Phædrus 14

Whether or not this claim has merit, my claim is that computers have trebled manufactured consent, so it allows people to be passively active, to have to specious notion of participation in the body politic, and yet are virtually tilting windmills.

It seems that some people have such nostalgia for their apparent way of life that any deviation is considered to be an affront and possible disruption. Perhaps, it’s because I feel there’s possibly as much to shed than to keep in my book, so for me, it’s more good riddance than oh heavens.