Self-proclaimed experts predict ruination from new technologies — ignore them

Dear Bob …

I’d be interested in your take on a recent piece by Nicholas Carr. He reports on research that seems to show that current trends regarding Internet use and all of the distracting technologies available to kids these days are damaging their ability to think logically.

[ Also on InfoWorld: We hate to say it, but Bob already told you so in “Experts are not to be trusted” | Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld’s Advice Line newsletter. ]

– Red Meat Waver

Dear RMW …

For me, as a matter of policy, I only read Nicholas Carr to give me more material to ridicule. He is, in my not-sufficiently-respectful opinion, a “bootstrapped pundit,” by which I mean he’s part a clique whose members declare each other to have Important Insights, thereby creating an echo chamber for their generally pointless opinionizing.

Here, Carr is pushing the sort of research that gives science a bad name. For example, he reports on a study of students who ignore a lecturer so as to read other material on the Internet. The “researchers” (in quotes — they don’t deserve the title) discovered students who do so are less likely to recall what the lecturer said. Their conclusion: Excessive online activity is weakening everyone’s brains.

All this proves is that with sufficient ingenuity, anyone can prove anything through sufficiently bad experimental design.

As a point of reference: This sort of thing goes around in roughly 10-year cycles, where whatever new technology happens to be is going to be what ruins the youth of America. It happened with movies, talkies, radio, television, and the Internet. In fact, Cliff Stoll published a book titled “Silicon Snake Oil” in 1996 that also predicted the ruin of America’s youth due to their spending excessive time online.

Before that, as lampooned in “The Music Man,” it was pocket billiards.

If you didn’t already figure this out, I’m sick to death of all the various versions of “the world is getting worse because people aren’t living their lives the way I lived my life.” Whether it’s George Will complaining about my choice of pants; my fellow boomers (who used to be hippies vowing to destroy “the system” but now are Wall Street bankers who have actually done so) complaining that Millennials are selfish; or Nicholas Carr, who started out claiming IT doesn’t matter, moved on to claim the cloud is of ultimate importance, so I guess IT does matter after all, and now says technology not only matters but is, in fact, evil.

Give it a rest, fellers. There are enough forces at work that could destroy or at least seriously damage the world. Pants, self-interest, and Facebook aren’t any of them.

– Bob

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