Saturday, December 04, 2010
iBrain and Macrowikinomics
Re the last post, am looking forward to reading:
Macrowikinomics; Rebooting Business and the World, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
and
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan.
The brain’s plasticity—its ability to change in response to stimuli from the environment—is well known. What has been less appreciated is how the expanding use of technology is shaping neural processing. Young people are exposed to digital stimulation for several hours every day, and many older adults are not far behind. Even using a computer for Web searches for just an hour a day changes the way the brain processes information. A constant barrage of e-contacts is both stimulating—sharpening certain cognitive skills—and draining, studies show.
Macrowikinomics; Rebooting Business and the World, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
and
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan.
The brain’s plasticity—its ability to change in response to stimuli from the environment—is well known. What has been less appreciated is how the expanding use of technology is shaping neural processing. Young people are exposed to digital stimulation for several hours every day, and many older adults are not far behind. Even using a computer for Web searches for just an hour a day changes the way the brain processes information. A constant barrage of e-contacts is both stimulating—sharpening certain cognitive skills—and draining, studies show.
Digital Rewiring of the Brain
From a Toronto Star article, December 4, 2010, by Geoff Pevere, Entertainment Columnist - about the changes that the digital age has brought and is bringing, even to the evolving of actual brain patterns, especially among youth and children.
Digital media has not only created a world that is starkly different from the world of a mere fifteen years ago, they have changed the way people who live in the world think, behave, create and consume. They have facilitated a generation gap that makes the divide between Boomers and their parents narrow by comparison, and they have accelerated the pace of cultural and political change to something like warp speed.
The future has arrived more quickly that most people were prepared for, and the consequences of this abrupt collision with tomorrow will likely not be fully understood for generations to come. Meanwhile, this much is certain: culturally, we’re not even in the same solar system as Kansas anymore.
“We believe the world has reached a critical turning point,” writes Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in Macrowikinomics, a book that situates changing cultural industries as central to the new digital era. “Reboot all the old models, approaches and structures or risk institutional paralysis or collapse.”
Neurologically, the reboot has already occurred, write Dr. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan in iBrain: Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind: “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”
And not simply in the way you may think: “Rather than simply catching ‘Digital,’ ” write Small and Vorgan, “many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed concentration.
“Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now — at a speed like never before,” they write.
Nowhere has this shift been more dramatic than in popular culture. The old models for the creation, production and dissemination of these things have virtually collapsed in the past decade. The industries producing music, movies, TV, books and news have seen their paradigms not merely shift but explode, and each is scrambling to re-define itself for a future where the only thing from the past that applies is our passion for pleasure.
This is a key point. For all that is changing neurologically, socially and institutionally, content is constant. As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Henry Jenkins writes in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, “History teaches us that old media never die — and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content.”
The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but also is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains. Daily exposure to high technology—computers, smart phones, video games, search engines such as Google and Yahoo—stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones. Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now—at a speed like never before.
Digital media has not only created a world that is starkly different from the world of a mere fifteen years ago, they have changed the way people who live in the world think, behave, create and consume. They have facilitated a generation gap that makes the divide between Boomers and their parents narrow by comparison, and they have accelerated the pace of cultural and political change to something like warp speed.
The future has arrived more quickly that most people were prepared for, and the consequences of this abrupt collision with tomorrow will likely not be fully understood for generations to come. Meanwhile, this much is certain: culturally, we’re not even in the same solar system as Kansas anymore.
“We believe the world has reached a critical turning point,” writes Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in Macrowikinomics, a book that situates changing cultural industries as central to the new digital era. “Reboot all the old models, approaches and structures or risk institutional paralysis or collapse.”
Neurologically, the reboot has already occurred, write Dr. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan in iBrain: Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind: “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”
And not simply in the way you may think: “Rather than simply catching ‘Digital,’ ” write Small and Vorgan, “many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed concentration.
“Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now — at a speed like never before,” they write.
Nowhere has this shift been more dramatic than in popular culture. The old models for the creation, production and dissemination of these things have virtually collapsed in the past decade. The industries producing music, movies, TV, books and news have seen their paradigms not merely shift but explode, and each is scrambling to re-define itself for a future where the only thing from the past that applies is our passion for pleasure.
This is a key point. For all that is changing neurologically, socially and institutionally, content is constant. As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Henry Jenkins writes in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, “History teaches us that old media never die — and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content.”
The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but also is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains. Daily exposure to high technology—computers, smart phones, video games, search engines such as Google and Yahoo—stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones. Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now—at a speed like never before.
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