Tyler Cowen is an economics professor who, despite coauthoring one of my favourite blogs and consuming prodigious amounts of information seems to share some of the skepticism I feel about how technology has changed the world. To quote a conversation Product Hunt hosted with him:
I am glad I was forced to live in "book culture" and "meat space' for my first forty years. Or maybe thirty-five years would have been enough. People these days have lost the sense of information being scarce, and counterintuitively that makes it harder for them to develop profound thoughts. It's like practicing chess by asking the computer right away, all the time, what the right move it. If I were starting today, probably I would not be an academic. The seductions of the on-line world would be too great, I am pretty sure.
Related to this, the OECD recently released a report looking at the role computers play in education. To quote a portion of of the report cited in Nicholas Carr's well-titled summary Tech in schools: less is more:
Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics. The results also show no appreciable improvements in student achievement in reading, mathematics or science in the countries that had invested heavily in ICT [information and communication technology] for education.
Overall I still like technology, but I think that it's also been oversold and the drawbacks of it often ignored. On a related note, I'd also recommend Kentaro Toyama's Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology.
