Richard Watson is a writer and consultant, who specialises in scenario-planning and the analysis of trends. On 27 January, Watson spoke at Blackwell’s in Oxford about his newest book Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing our Minds, Why this Matters, and What We Can Do about It (2010). Future Minds expresses concern about the pernicious effects of technology on the brain, arguing that the Internet and contemporary multimedia impair the ability to think deeply and creatively. The book enters an ongoing discussion about the Internet’s influence on cognitive ability (see articles by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal), but is unique in its focus on ways to curb our addiction to technology. He spoke to the Oxonian Review about the relative rate of contemporary innovation and the relationship between technology and education. For more about Richard Watson, visit What’s Next and Future Files & Future Minds.

You argue that technology can impair the development of important skill sets, namely the ability to think deeply and creatively.

That’s really my focus. What are these technologies doing to our thinking? But we’ve got to be careful because obviously there are different types of technology and equally there are different types of thinking. And I think [technology] is enhancing different types of thinking but it is eroding others.

Should recourse to technology in the classroom be limited?

I think it should. I need more time to think about how that works…But I think fundamentally we need to ask: What kind of thinking are we after? What kind of technology best supports that? I would regard pencils and papers and books as much a technology as a blackboard. So we need to think very hard about what we’re trying to achieve and what are the best tools for the job…There should be periods when technology is switched off. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you are trying to cram information, then by all means use a computer, use a whiteboard. But if you’re trying to do more than that, to understand context—for instance, what was the Battle of Britain and why did it happen?—then I think that needs physical interaction.

You criticise the current emphasis that schools place on quantitative analysis. Do we change the curriculum to give more emphasise to the humanities?

Yes, and this isn’t particularly my view. It is Ken Robinson’s more than anyone else’s. But I think we are only educating one half of our brain: the left logical side…The education system is still producing the same type of person and the world has changed. Bear in mind if you’re 5 years old and starting education, the world when you graduate is going to be an incredibly different place. It seems to me we’re training people for the wrong skills… The thing that has real value is the ability to relate to other people physically and emotionally. We talk about the information economy ad nauseam but we don’t really educate for it, and so creativity is sort of relegated…It’s not a real subject. The real subjects are like law and medicine. But these other things have equal weight…Essentially the education system is set up to say there’s a right answer for everything. Learn it; go and apply it. That’s true if you’re an engineer, and for a lot of scientists, there is one answer. But in a lot of areas, there isn’t. There are lots of different answers…We essentially teach convergent thinking: there’s one right answer. And actually, if you want a culture of innovation, you need to encourage divergent thinking.

In the United States there’s a big scare that the Chinese are out-educating Americans in the maths and sciences. Do you think these fears are missing the point?

Someone sent me an e-mail last night and it’s got a great slogan. They’ve got this campaign called “No right brain left behind”. It’s fabulous; I love that. I read a statistic recently. It said that 90% of PhDs in science and engineering reside in Asia…The issues in America are healthcare, obviously, but also education. The same is true in Britain. We are falling behind…We just don’t know what’s about to hit us. The Chinese take education so seriously. There are certain subjects you can’t teach unless you have a certain grade in that subject. Here, you can fail maths four times and eventually pass and then teach maths. You could not do that in China.

The interesting thing about China [and a few other countries] is that they’ve got a model that’s all about the production of low-cost stuff. The challenge now is to move up the value chain; they’ve got to start not just producing this stuff. They’ve got to start inventing. Now to what extent can they do that? To what extent is Silicon Valley dependent on the American Dream and that political system of freedom, etc.? Some people say you can’t have an innovation economy without freedom, but those people were probably also saying you can’t have capitalism without democracy, and the Chinese have proved that completely wrong. My feeling is that there are issues [correlating] serious innovation and creativity and originality. Unless you have openness and freedom, [innovation] could be quite constrained. I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal stuff from McKinsey. When they hire Indian and particularly Chinese graduates, there is a sort of groupthink going on there. They’re not going to challenge the teacher in a different direction. And for serious innovation you need that disruptive element; you need the wise ass. And maybe the Chinese system isn’t creating that, but maybe I don’t know enough about it.

In your talk, you said that Alvin Toffler was 30 years ahead of his time. You also invoked phrases of another mid-century analyst of technological change, Marshall McLuhan, such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message”. To me this suggests that Toffler wasn’t ahead of his time at all, but rather these technological changes have always been with us, and I wonder whether this is merely a change in pace?

There’s a quote I use from William Gibson: “The Future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.” Change always comes from the fringe…If you want to see the future, there are certain places you can go and you’ll get it. The history of prediction is appalling. It’s not that they’re wrong; it’s that their timing stinks. They are too optimistic about how quickly change is going to happen. There’s an argument that says change is accelerating; that it’s happening quicker than it used to. A lot of people are [predicting] what’s going to happen in the future, and [their predictions] are probably a decade off. There’s also the classic mistake of saying x will replace y. It’s a sort of binary argument. And actually it’s not like that. [For example] physical newspapers will not die. They may be an exception rather than the rule, and the same with books. There are going to be multiple futures and you can buy into the future you want.

With Toffler, that’s what’s been the case. There’s a really good book called Future Hype, written by an American computer scientist, who tries to put the predictions of technology into some kind of a historical context, and it’s really interesting looking at what people say now versus what they said 100 years ago. To some extent, I think his argument is that compared to the level of change we talk about now, there was actually more change during the Industrial Revolution. It was far more rapid, far more impactful. In a sense, there’s no reason to be anxious—it’s all nothing.

You encourage people to occasionally isolate themselves from technology and offer advice for how to do this: experiencing the outdoors, turning off mobile phones whilst on vacation, etc. But how optimistic are you that people will voluntarily remove technology from their lives?

[Technology] is a bit like drugs, cocaine, and alcohol. It’s rather satisfying if you are involved in social networks; [they] make you feel in control and important…A study was done on cell phone use, and [the researchers] withdrew the cell phone and a few other things, and the physical and emotional symptoms were exactly the same as going cold turkey from serious drug addiction. I don’t think we’re going to acknowledge this as a problem for 5 to 10 years minimum. I then think it will be acknowledged. South Korea and America are the only countries that have Internet addiction clinics at the moment. I think it will become more common 15 to 20 years down the line. Even so, most people will deny that they have a problem.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review. William Kolkey is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

Ask most members of the public and they’ll describe literacy as the ability to read and write text. But over the last 30 years, the new literacy studies movement has suggested that a major shift in our conceptions of literacy is needed. They see literacy as a culturally and ideologically situated phenomenon; literacy—or rather literacies—depend on where you are, who you are, and what medium you use to get your message across.

So, contemporary transformations in technology—iPads and iPods, BlackBerrys and broadband—do more than change the way we read and write; they change what it means to be literate and how literacies fit into our everyday lives. Gunther Kress, a professor of semiotics and education at the University of London, has argued that the medium of literacy is rapidly changing from the book to the screen, and since our screens are dominated by visual stimuli and organised according to spatial principles of the eye, we are leaving the written word behind and adopting the image as our primary form of meaning-making.

The image-sensitivity of new technologies and their affordances—what they enable us to do with visual stimuli—are seen by some as responding to a fundamental human desire to make meanings in a range of modalities. Young children play with meanings and symbols through gesture, drawing, sculpting, and eventually writing. When children do enter the realm of writing, they hold on tightly to the potential of the image, offering the reader clues to the meaning of a written word through the size of the word (“caterpillar” will be written much smaller than “dog”) or its colour. The multimodality of children’s early literacy increasingly corresponds, Kress and others argue, to an adult’s digital and online experiences of communication and expression.

But what does a relationship between the intuitive symbolic work of children and the design of contemporary technologies mean for the academic world? If being an intellectual is partly about distancing oneself from the experience of the masses in order to develop an objective stance in relation to an experience, how can the new aspects of literacy—digital and visual—inform practice within universities?

It seems telling (perhaps even concerning) that the arguments for a radical change in the way we make meaning—arguments heralding the age of the image—have all been presented in the form of paperbacks and journal articles, with relatively few deviations from the written word. This leads us to ask several questions. Is the age of the image a reality, or part of the 21st-century hype surrounding the capabilities of new technologies? If it is a reality, is there evidence to suggest that academic practices are changing and catching up with the rest of the world? Or is there a concerted effort within academia to reject, perhaps even deny, contemporary trends in literacy?

The growing prevalence of research using images as sources suggests that though words may continue to act as a means for building arguments and sharing ideas, data collection and the credibility and validity of sources are being thought of in new ways. Images have been increasingly used as a source in history, ethnography, and sociology. Part of the lure of the image in the social sciences seems to be its perceived openness. For researchers who hope to include their participants’ ideas in the research process and thereby empower the communities they study, images can be used as a starting point for discussion and interpretation. The collaborative work of artists such as Wendy Ewald, a photographer who worked with new immigrant communities in Margate to establish voice and presence through public images, has in this regard inspired the work of social researchers.

Academic blogging has been seen as another way to prioritise the accessibility of information and narrow the gap between the public and the university. Academic bloggers Julia Davies and Guy Merchant, however, have shown that their own blogging and online conversations can become as closed as more traditional methods of sharing information, whereby “no attempt is made within the comments to explain to others beyond the group and in this way meanings are kept closed; the group is in some ways exclusive despite the fact that the discussion is taking place online.”

Despite this, Davies and Merchant have maintained a faith in the democratic nature of online academic discussion, and particularly the use of photographic images, which they understand as helping readers to identify an appropriate “reading path” for themselves. They used Flickr to upload photos to their blogging sites, and these photos often sparked discussion and comment in a way that written ideas did not. But how far does the faith of Davies, Merchant, and other digital-inspired researchers go? Does it affect their experiences of other offline responsibilities? Are their lecture slides constructed around images rather than bullet-pointed text? Can students in their classes hand in photo-essays rather than written essays? Do they expect classes to interact in online communities through image-sharing as much as through spoken discussion?

New educational technologies such as WordPress, Moodle, and Elluminate are discussed by Bertram C. Bruce, a researcher exploring the relationship between technology and learning in the past and present day, in his blog (http://chipbruce.wordpress.com/teaching/technologies/). But Bruce warns against understanding technology as a set of capabilities, disassociated from the social needs or fears which drive technological change. The increasing prevalence of the image is not therefore caused by new technologies, but rather by individuals acting on perceived desires—such as the want for increased accessibility and collaboration in research.

We need to trace not just the use of the image within academic settings, but the feelings academics and students have toward activities and events that depend on image-based meaning making, plotting these on a historical trajectory. For example, we could hypothesise that since reading and writing have become commonplace abilities in our society, the need to distinguish the intellectual through their use of the written word has declined, and the disadvantages of using images in academic practice have been reduced. Such social factors, as much as the latest gadget, are determining the presence of images in the academic world. Both literacy and technology are culture-made products, in constant transaction with each other and the social context. Behind the new uses of the image in academic research and practice lie the social factors—roles, attitudes, and interactions—that should constitute the starting point for further exploration of the image in literacy and academic practice.

Mona Sakr is reading for a DPhil in Psychology and Education at Oxford Brookes University.

Ken Auletta
Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
Virgin Books, 2010
400 Pages
£11.99
ISBN 978-0753522660

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“I fear theirs is an old story about how good people deceive themselves.”
-Lawrence Lessig

While this foreboding sentiment might sound like something out of a Thomas Hardy novel, it is in fact directed at one of the world’s most trusted and ubiquitous companies. In Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Ken Auletta tells the trusted, ubiquitous company’s story, offering along the way a guided tour of the brave new digital world in which we now live. “The world has been Googled,” writes Auletta, swept up and fundamentally altered by the last decade’s wave of technological change, stemming from the Internet and new media (think of “The End of the World as We Know It” more in the R.E.M. and less in the post-apocalyptic sense, and you follow Auletta’s logic).

As would be expected, Auletta—a longtime contributor to the New Yorker on the Internet’s cultural impact—presents Google as a profoundly influential media company with far-reaching ambitions. “If you can solve search,” Google co-founder Larry Page explains, “that means you can answer any question. Which means you can do basically anything.” From this pronouncement follows Auletta’s straightforward thesis that  “any company with Google’s power needs to be scrutinized.” We cannot begin to scrutinize Google, Auletta adds, until we have understood that “Google search produces not a tangible product but something abstract: knowledge.”

While admirably condensed, this account of Google’s function raises certain questions about how we might distinguish between information and knowledge—questions which Auletta too often fails adequately to address. Is access to information, for instance, the same thing as knowledge? Though Auletta does not answer this question, he does opine that information has become the new currency of power in the online era. This power shift is reflected in Auletta’s interviews with advertising moguls who demonstrate a totalizing desire to possess more and more consumer information and who have promoted and  invested in technology bearing creepily Orwellian overtones: television sets with built-in facial recognition software and “brain-reading” algorithms, all in an effort to make advertising more efficient and thus more profitable.

Throughout Googled, Auletta provides rare insight into the inner workings of the company’s recondite yet famously fun-spirited unconventionality. For outsiders looking in, Auletta’s interviews with Google insiders as well as competitors will be of unquestionable interest; the book is full of both amusing and telling anecdotes. Few people may have heard, for example, that an early candidate for the company name was “The Whatbox,” which was finally rejected by Google co-founder Sergey Brin because it “sounded too much like ‘Wetbox,’ which sounded like some sort of porn site.” In another instance Brin once requested an example of a recent Harvard Law graduate’s work, saying, “I need you to draw me a contract. . . .I need the contract to be for me to sell my soul to the devil.”

Auletta also touches on the familiar yet vitally important issue of privacy in the Digital Age, or what he dubs The Google Era, in which “the issue of privacy [has become] entwined with the issue of power.” He goes on to draw attention to the contradictory attitudes held by many towards privacy—distrusting the government and corporations like Google on the one hand, while parading the most private of thoughts on Facebook and Twitter on the other. Accordingly, our misgivings about privacy should not simply be channeled into criticism of Google, Auletta would argue, but rather taken as symptomatic of the more general indiscretion of our digital culture. In alluding to Neil Postman’s famous anticipation of media culture in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Auletta suggests that we are all at risk of being implicated in such a state:

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think […] Orwell feared those would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Prompted by Huxley’s insights, Auletta asks, “Is Google good or evil?” The answer would seem to be yes and no. Auletta takes pains to portray instances of Google’s goodness, as in their refusal in 2006 to furnish the US Department of Justice with search records (AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo silently consented). Perhaps, then, the Google slogan, “Don’t be evil,” is more than just a cute corporate motto; perhaps it is emblematic of a rare form of corporate virtuousness. And yet, such virtuous acts aside, it must be admitted that for most users, Google is good simply because it is free, a symbol of the democratization of information.

But matters of good and evil are, of course, never clear-cut. Some of Google’s detractors would allege that the company’s greatest strengths are also its weaknesses. As an engineering company, Google is obsessed with making things better and faster, all the time, which has led critics to complain that Google lacks a social gene, especially when it comes to issues of privacy or transparency. Questions of knowledge cannot be solved in a vacuum; thus, information “needs a social context.” This is undoubtedly to oversimplify the issue, and indeed Google’s competitors do seem overly persuaded by an image of the company ‘s Vulcanized over-reliance on metrics and data in place of human judgment. (“Google is just focused on CPU—central processing computers—and ignores the processing of the human brain,” writes John Borthwick, former VP of Technology at Time Warner). Auletta is quick to note, however, that privacy issues have long been a source of criticism for Google, which inevitably strikes a precarious balance between knowing enough and knowing too much.

What is Google, then? Is it, as Eric Schmidt says, “a moral force” for good? Or is it “The Evil Empire” that many of its competitors claim it to be? Whatever the case may be, the Google story is far from over; questions and answers will continue for as long as the company continues to be a major cultural force. Whether or not the planet has indeed been “Googled,” Auletta’s book remains an intelligent and timely investigation into the rapidly evolving world of new media and internet in which we live.

(For those that are interested, you may also wish to visit Ken Auletta’s website, in which you can see the “lost chapter” from Googled).

Tyler Shores is reading for an MSt in English Literature at Christ Church College, Oxford. He previously worked at Google for the Authors@Google programme.