There’s a lot of debates going on now, and it has been going on for several years, as to whether all the digital influence on our lives is making us smarter. One group says that children do worse now on spelling tests because of spell check. Anther group counters that the the quality of writing by student has gone up because they have access to professional tools. The back and forth is endless.
When we try to measure intelligence (an already difficult task) we have to ask what that means. Often it breaks down into two camps. In one camp we have ‘raw’ intelligence and rote memorization – what can people do with just their brains. The other group is concerned with real world output. I fall into the second group. The truth is that we don’t have to ask the question ‘What can people do without a computer, with out the internet, with out a cell phone, with out a calculator’. These tool are always there, they are more prominent than ever and their proliforation is accelerating.
The cell phone has had many unexpected consequences over the last twenty years. It is a monumentally important device, but by itself, no more so than dozens of others (cars, computers, television, radio, printing presses). The cell phones history stretches across the 20th century with early radio uses being more akin to modern cell use than our current broadcast radio model. But it wasn’t until the mid 80′s that we were able to start developing the infrastructure to really get cell phones into the main stream. At first, they were just mobile phones, their use was no different from a normal phone, just their location (anywhere).