Shallows and the art of memory

29 July 2013

I just finished reading What the internet is doing to our brains: the shallows. All in all it is a good read, talking primarily about how the internet makes us multitask, therefore not allowing us to concentrate on anything and be deep.

While the book does have a point, as it has been shown over and again that we are now insanely multitasking and this is hurting us at so many different levels, the book is obviously not the only point of view on cognition related to the Web. While the Web does shape the way we work, some would call this Zeitgeist or our being a unity with our surrounding situation, the Web-driven cognition has advantages that vastly outnumber the strong tendency to multitask.

Briefly, these advantages come down to the concept of situated cognition, which according to Wikipedia could be defined as "knowing is inseparable from doing[1] by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts." Another way to put it is to say that situated cognition has four main components stating that cognition are not only the concepts you have in your brain, but it is spread over your situation, namely:

Extended cognition: your cognition is extended by the technology you use and the social group you have access to. When it comes to the Web, this means that you are far smarter when you have access to Google or to a social network where you can go back and forth with your peers.
Enacted cognition: your cognition is what you do. With the wide availability of tools and technologies on the Web, this means you can do far more than if you were isolated.
Embodied cognition: your cognition is heavily influenced by your emotions or whatever bodily sensation. This is already present in the multiple ways that the Web can drive us towards extremes of emotion, but is about to get pumped up by new technologies like as wearable computing.
Embedded cognition: your cognition is heavily influenced by your physical environment. Think about the multiple "reminders" you have all over the place, from road traffic signs guiding you on how to drive all the way to leaving your wallet always on the same place so that you can remember to take it with you when you go out. While we are just taking the first steps here when it comes to Web, new technologies such as Google Glass will bring embedded cognition to the next level.

This is all to say that the complaints about Web-driven multitasking being "the end of civilization as we know it" are just a new flavor of the traditional "the ancients really knew how to do it." This is not new, my favorite example being the strong reaction against Guttenberg's press when it came out since it was destroying "the art of memory". Is it that exercising your memory is not important? Absolutely not, it's just that in face of the benefits that book production in large scale brought society far outnumbered the benefits of memorizing book passages since books were so expensive.

Instead, it's probably time to leverage this new Web-situated cognition so that we can take full advantage of its multiple benefits. Of course this means we will have to have far more resources for formal and informal education taking advantage of situated cognition principles. Examples abound: Rather than preventing students from using Web sources, teach them about how to evaluate the quality of the information, blend different sources to come up with something new, focus on getting them to execute relevant tasks using information rather than imply having them memorizing content, and so on.

Of course this new focus will require us to completely revamp education as we know it. I personally think that Merrienboer's Complex Learning is in the direction we should be following, but this is a topic for another post altogether.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.