Marc Prensky opens his article From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom with the following quote from Albert Einstein
The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.
Prensky is not only making the argument for thinking different (as Einstein suggests) but to a whole new level of wisdom — digital wisdom. Furthermore, Presnsky offers the following definition:
Digital wisdom is a twofold concept, referring both to wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities.
The key to Presnsky’s argument is that we use technology to extend or more specifically enhance our human capabilities. We are already using technology to some extend to extend our memory through digital storage. Digital technology can enhance our minds and lead to greater wisdom because it enhances our:
- Access to data
- Ability to conduct deeper analysis
- Ability to plan and prioritize
- Insights into others
- Access to alternative perspectives
The objections to digital enhancement Prensky argues are very similar to objections that have traditionally be leveled against new technologies. For example in Plato’s The Phaedrus, Socrates objects to writing on the basis that it undermines the memory.
Some would argue the opposite. In Everything Bad is Good For You (2005), Steven Johnson argues that the new technologies associated with contemporary popular culture, from video games to the Internet to television and film, make far more cognitive demands on us than did past forms, thus increasing our capabilities in a wide variety of cognitive tasks.
Prenskys concluding remarks offer a balanced perspective that we should genuinely consider:
Nobody suggests that people should stop using and improving their unaided minds, but I am opposed to those who claim the unenhanced mind and unaided thinking are somehow superior to the enhanced mind. To claim this is to deny all of human progress, from the advent of writing to the printing press to the Internet. Thinking and wisdom have become, in our age, a symbiosis of the human brain and its digital enhancements.
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