Dumbing down and smartening up via the Web

Social networking and information design will have a profound effect on generations to come

As an old friend once told me, whenever there’s a transition in a culture, something is lost. When Gutenberg invented the printing press and written information became widely available, tricks for recording history orally were lost. Prior to literacy, people leaned on poetry more to relay their histories because poetry provided a structure to help them remember their stories.

We are going through such a transition now. And we can watch as two opposing trends regarding people’s relationship with information unfold thanks to the World Wide Web.

One trend is bent on grabbing folks’ attention; the other is geared toward moving their attention to where deeper sets of shared knowledge reside. How these two trends affect one another could have wide-reaching implications on how information affects our lives.

The scarier trend is what I call the dumbing down of information to accommodate what some are calling Digital Natives, aka DNs. As far as I can tell, the term originated in 2001 in a blog titled “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” by Marc Prensky.

Prensky says DNs are all “native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.”

Digital Immigrants, on the other hand, are “those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many of or most aspects of the new technology.”

Gartner, on its media Weblog, six years later, picks up on this theme, proclaming that DNs “absorb information differently from digital immigrants.”

Whereas Digital Immigrants are “more methodical, find text a far more efficient way of absorbing information, and invest time clicking on a video link only if they think it will really add value to the story,” Digital Natives “graze somewhat randomly for information, scanning Web pages for photos and video, and reading the text only if the images capture their attention.”

This is where I start to get scared.

Please understand me, I do not believe information needs to be “dumbed down” for DNs because they are any less intelligent than non-natives, aka DIs. Obviously, any evolutionary changes in humanity, negative or positive, would take a bit longer than the approximately 25 years since the birth of the PC age.

What I am saying is that, as in any business, the people who make money from consumers have figured out how to attract, how to sell, and how to keep customers coming back to their Web site, be it an e-store or an online news service. Therefore, we can expect over time more and more of the Web to adopt the environment that appeals to those who “read text only if the images capture their attention.”

Capturing and holding the attention of a viewer, not a reader, started with television. Sociologists have long been commenting on the fact that American television programming jumps from scene to scene far more rapidly than British programs do. It both appeals to and, I think, helps create viewers with shorter attention spans.

I have two concerns about this development. One, unless we get DNs to behave more like DIs, future generations will have a harder time developing the study skills they need to master and understand their environment in order to become the kind of professionals — doctors, architects, engineers — that we need to keep a complex society running.

My second fear is political. Unless our future generations learn to analyze content and understand issues by reading deeply, they will be far more susceptible to being manipulated — and not likely for noble goals.

OK, that’s on the downside. On the smartening up side, I see the concept of social networking — in business and nonbusiness environments — creating a growing pool of people who have access to and thus are aware of far more information than ever before.

Companies such as Attensa and ConnectBeam are at the cutting edge, creating enterprise-level social networking technology that allows users to easily exchange information. This in turn allows more people to use information more intelligently.

Making information and the people who possess it available to others can have a viral effect, too, one that will motivate future generations to tap into a variety of sources of information to obtain a complete picture on any given issue.

Perhaps we can also say when you have a transition in the culture something is gained.