IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015 - 9

of a more formal kind of analytical
thinking that was fundamentally
different from conversation.
In the early days of writing, messages had to be carefully crafted
and painstakingly delivered from
one end of the literate world to
another. The message had to be
formulated with sufficient clarity to
stand the test of the time it would
take for the receiver to read the
message. Its meaning was frozen in
time. But once it had spanned the
distance of countries or oceans, the
message connected two minds via a
single message; ideas were shared
and plans were hatched. Those who
could write had to think carefully
and write well as they were the conveyors of important messages that
had to get out of one mind, in one
place and time, into another mind,
in another place and time, perhaps
months later. When the message
was read, the time and distance
between the two were erased: the
effect was to close the distance

OPINION

between the two as their independent minds connected.
Fast forward to 21st century
contemporary society. Our techenabled communication (e.g., via
emails, tweets, and texts) has broken both the space and time barriers; tech-messages are sent and
received instantaneously. We send
a text from Paris and someone in
New York smiles. A movie star tweets
about a new love interest and thousands of people immediately tweet
in response. But ironically, our ability to communicate instantaneously
with each other via our devices has
caused a regression in our language
skills. Tech-driven communication has
blurred the traditional divide between
verbal and written communications
so that young people write like they
speak, and sometimes, lack the skills
to do otherwise. Social media have
seduced us into transforming the formal, thought-enhancing written form
of communication into an impersonal
form of oral communication.

We like to think of ourselves as
exceptionally smart and even unique
in the animal world because of our
abstract thought and nuanced communication, especially the quintessentially human examples of
creative writing, poetry, philosophy,
and literature. None of these can be
expressed in texts or tweets. And it
would be stupid of us to carelessly lose those human specialties. A
truly smart species should be able
to utilize tech-communication appropriately, which means not letting it
eclipse our hard-earned human skill
of real writing. Let's not let social
media make us stupid.

Author Information
Liz Stillwaggon Swan is in Longmont, CO; email: lizstillwaggonswan@
gmail.com.
Louis Goldberg is with SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY; email: goldberg@
buffalo.edu.

(continued from page 7)

slave makers just as quickly lapsed
into their usual indolent ways."
The takeaway: Yes. We're not
ants, but just as the slave making
ants lost the ability and willingness
to do for themselves, even to the
extent of perishing from hunger, so
do we face the increasing prospect
of a losing it for not using it future.
According to Wilson, "The evolution of social parasitism in ants
works like a ratchet, allowing
a species to slip further down in
parasitic dependence but not
back up toward its original freeliving existence" [4]. The ratchet of

MARCH 2015

parasitic dependence in
ants has a message for
us: Just because technology can do the work for
us, doesn't mean that
it should.

We face the prospect of a "losing
it for not using it" future.

Author Information
Jeff Robbins is with Rutgers
University, New Brunswick, NJ. Email:
jhrobbin@rci.rutgers.edu.

References
[1] "We are becoming enslaved by our technology," Intelligence2, The Forum for Live Debate,
Aug. 12, 2014; http://www.iq2oz.com/debates/
we-are-becoming-enslaved-by-our-technology-/.

∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

[2] N.Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and
Us. Norton, 2014.
[3] L. Adleman, "Resurrecting smallpox? Easier than you think" (OpEd), New York Times,
Oct. 15, 2014.
[4] E.O. Wilson, "Slavery in ants," Scientific Amer., vol. 232, no. 6, pp: 32-36, 1975;
https://archive.org/details/ants_13347.

https://www.archive.org/details/ants_13347 http://www.iq2oz.com/debates/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015