While technology offers many advantages and makes learning easier, it can also limit young people’s natural ability to learn. Constant exposure to short, fast-changing content weakens their capacity to develop and use long-term memory.
Our times are full of exciting developments when it comes to technology. By its meaning, function, and purpose, technology is directed toward the systematic and progressive growth of human skills, enhancing both the quality of life and productivity.
From its Greek etymology, the first part is from the root ‘techne’, meaning art, craft, skill or method, and the latter part is from ‘logia’, meaning systematic study or discourse of something. As such, it is in the very essential nature of technology to grow, because new discoveries are built upon the older ones, and lessons are learnt from mistakes done previously. This means we can as well call it the practical application of scientific knowledge.
However, the human person has always been at the centre of the interests of technology; even space explorations are a thing to talk about just because humans are exploring the possibility of migrating there.
For the most part technology has improved speed, of course, alongside efficiency. Be it in production and supply chains, farms, communication and transportation, warfare and global security, or medical care, to mention a few. But the question in all this is, is this speedy pace of things safe and healthy for us? Do we have a functioning built-in adaptation for all this, especially when such technology engages directly with us, such as the communication technology served for our use via social media?
Social media floods us with so much information at the same time. One can scroll for about ten minutes and explore about 20 completely unrelated topics communicating different moods, energies, messages, etc., beginning from news, opinions, memes, music, adverts, skits, sports, and many other random things. At least a quarter of these are AI-generated, and another quarter are heavily manipulated as compared to reality.
Scientists raise a lot of concerns over attention span and cognitive load, processing efficiency, memory, depth of thinking, capacity for sustained focus, and above all the capacity to learn deeply. These are issues among people exposed to social media but they manifest in other areas of life and indiscriminately affect people of all ages and educational backgrounds, except those who take deliberate, bold steps.
Question of dependence
As technology has been assigned an indispensable value to humans, there are areas where its interaction with humans has not been limited, and as such, it is given primacy in matters where mere human cognition would productively outshine it in the long run. Children, for example, are taught that calculators are for doing addition, multiplication, subtraction and division maths, even before they can learn to do them.
The result? They make that particular difficult or challenging transformative moment a permanent function of the calculator, unaware that they can learn and can do it as fast as a calculator and that that skill will be of so much help in the future. Here, technology has crowded human capacity and has denied it the capacity to grow and mature at such an important stage. There are many examples of this nature.
In addition, for most young people, the natural abilities to learn are limited by technology, amidst the many advantages, as it makes learning easy. The long-term, or rather regular, exposure to brief and fast-changing content makes it hard for young people to develop and exploit their capacity for long-term memory.
Neuroscience experts highlight the growing gap between ‘recognition memory’ and ‘retrieval memory’. The former is remembering that one saw something; the latter is the capacity to retrieve and explain it. The gap between these is growing fast, and it impacts long-term learning. The exposure also creates an effect similar to an addiction, where one continually craves similar content. The problem of short-term content is at the very centre of its profitability; hence, the emphasis of its harmful effects remains largely unpublicised.
Furthermore, technology impacts our physical bodies by the very exposure itself. This is because the devices around us use energy and emit radiation, leading to many emerging health issues that were never that popular in the past. Habits that have come with technology as regards the handling of devices also impact human life. For example, many people have normalised the habit of sleeping with their phones or carrying them in pockets and attached to the skin and groin area, etc., but all these are harmful due to the radiofrequency exposure.
With time, it seems there is a technological solution for every problem—even the simplest tasks we could manage ourselves. It is crucial to take necessary precautions to avoid limiting our own abilities by relying too heavily on technology. Younger people, in particular, require constant guidance in this regard.
Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation and a student of the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, the Philippines. Website: www.shimbopastory.com
