Being Stupid Makes Us Stupid

So about a week and a half ago, I wrote a fairly glowing mini-post about the rise and use of Twitter as a means of information dissemination and analysis. My psuedo-intellectual conclusion was,

The current outage just caused a moment of reflection on how we increasingly use new forms of technology in very post-postmodern ways that intertwine the subjective and the objective in interesting ways. Truth becomes a collective excavation of infinitely networked negotiations towards a reconciliation of acceptable perspectives that cohere to a felt experience.

I tried to break down at what I was driving in the comments and, all-in-all, I remain committed to that conclusion. But one can’t deny or ignore the counter examples that fly in the face of seeing emergent technologies as wholly a good thing. To wit, I stumbled across a story about the rise and fall of rumours surrounding Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley’s death intentionally started by booking agent and blogger Andrew Bucket (pseudonym) on Twitter just to see how far one tweet could go.

The result? Further than you might think.

Of particular note is this anecdote that Bucket later provided in an interview with the website that debunked the rumour, AltPress.com,

I’m the booking manager for the Velvet Lounge in D.C., so I have a Twitter account with a lot of followers on it, and BrightestYoungThings is basically the most popular blog in D.C. I said, “Let’s do Deryck Whibley.” It literally was the first person to come out of my mouth–he just has that kind of “Rick Moranis” quality. That was the rumor when I was growing up–before the internet–that Rick Moranis had died. It’s kind of believable because there’s no way anyone could ever confirm or deny that it’s true because it’s a person you don’t see enough of. We just threw a little blood in the water. I put one Twitter post up and it was a little literary. I said something like, “friends of the scene in Las Vegas have given us the sad news” then BrightestYoungThings retweeted it and posted the story. The thing about picking Deryck Whibley—he was just a good character for this ruse. I don’t wish death upon him. What we really wanted to see was if using our resources, we could start some kind of a buzz or whatever–and it worked. Within an hour, it had been retweeted 200 times over, then you guys picked it up and then I got called by the Washington Post. I don’t know how they got my number. [Laughs.] They already had a story cooked up about it. Five hours later, and I’ve gone from one Twitter post to being published in the Washington Post and on the Altpress website.

A quick search of the Post’s website for mentions of Whibley don’t reveal anything about the Internet rumours around his death, but it is undoubtedly sad and a certain endictment of new media culture that the hoax went as far as it did. One can practically see the line ups of new folks streaming in to further populate the Is Google Making Us Stupid? meme.

But both contra and pace Freddie, it’s not so much that Google or Twitter or the Internets are making us stupid as it is that being stupid is making us stupid.

On some level, I think that the title of the linked post by Freddie and its final line are misleading because his post clearly points not to the failures of the Internet or any of our emergent technological platforms, but to the human failures inherent in their use. It is just too easy, too pat to blame the kids with their hippity-hop and their tweetering and their HALO 3 for the perceived lack of attention span and critical faculties that we seem to exhibit today. However, it remains worth pointing out that studies, by and large, remain inconclusive on the matter while, if you place any stock in this sort of thing,

Scores on intelligence tests have been steadily rising since the 1940s, says University of Utah neuropsychologist Sam Goldstein. The tests measure a child’s ability to shift and divide attention, but they also cover problem-solving and comprehension skills. “They’re smarter,” Goldstein says.

And we forget all the ways in which we enabled gossip and real life incarnations of telephone in equally stupid manners without the help of the Internet, Twitter, text messaging and the like. Focusing on the technological differences seems so prevalent because it allows us to shift out attention and consternation away from the fact that many of the outcomes vis-a-vis technology are rooted in the underlying human values that utilize that technology.

There is no dearth of stories like the one linked above or those to which Freddie pointed demonstrating the failures of technology in our modern world. Those stories are important counter points to our ever-burgeoning faith in the miracles of modern science, to be certain. And there is no doubt that technology has an incredible impact on the way in which we perceive and experience the world.

But I think it equally important that we look a bit deeper than the latest gadget to see the ways in which we choose to interact with and utilize the technology at our disposal and recognize that, as often as anything, failures on this planet are human generated phenomena. We can still use technology in the way that I, with too much time on my hands, described. There are still reasons to be awe struck by the ways in which technology changes the face of the world in which we live. But doing so doesn’t involve a free lunch and if we continue to seek out technological scape goats for our own inherent failings and stupidity rather than having the mettle to face them head on, both in ourselves and in others…

Well, let’s just say there isn’t an App for that.

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