The death of society by technology has been greatly exaggerated

I'm kinda a contrarian by my nature. I know that.

I wouldn't say I'm cynical, I'm actually pretty trusting. Almost to a fault. But I love when the facts and logic of a situation play out differently than the emotion or "common wisdom."

And I usually enjoy shouting it from the rooftops. Which doesn't always make me a great person with which to have a conversation. But I think its what drew me to news and reporting. At least in part. Also, I like to laugh at stupid people.

So, with this in mind, here is another contrarian posting that aims to dispute the "good old days of yore" meme and the idea that the world is falling apart, largely thanks to technology.

- Socrates warned his fellow man against writing (writing!). He thought it would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls."
- He also thought (perhaps properly) that children couldn't tell fiction from reality, so he suggested that parents never tell them created stories and rely instead on stories from real life.

Wait, it gets better
- Conrad Gessner warned against the modern world and how it the overwhelmed people with information. He suggested this information overload caused confusion and damage to the mind. He died in 1565.
- A frenchman (0f course, right?) - Malesherbes - warned that getting news from the printed page would isolate readers. It was more uplifting, he thought, to get your news from the pulpit. This is the same newspapers that today are held as bastions of civilized society and whose demise is heralded as the end of the world by some.
- Even schools have been targeted, with some early studies suggesting that organized schooling exhausted children's brains and nervous systems
- Excessive studying was once thought to cause madness.

Its the same, but worse , from there on out. Radio is the dirge of a well-0rdered society ... TV will destroy the nice, wholesome radio-based community ... the internet will crush the wisdom we have all gotten from the TV.

Its worth noting that early worriers thought "Email hurts IQ more than pot." That's a Daily Telegraph headline, not National Enquirer headline.

So, next time someone laments the "shortened attention spans" created by TV, the internet, or the InterGoogle, or whatever is next, keep in mind that no studies show this to be the case. In fact, according to this slate.com article, not only does the evidence not suggest this, it actually suggests the opposite. Technology is making our lives better, with social networking sites providing better better offline social lives and video games allowing players to better absorb inforamtion information without a loss of accuracy.

And don't forget the studies showing that television viewing doesn't have a negative impact on our health. Or our ability to... um, wait, its on the tip of my tongue... if only I had been able to avoid schooling I could probably remem... of yeah, our ability to concentrate.

These fears about the ever increasing media, often fueled by the existing media, are exactly the reason why media isn't implicitly worth saving.

1) We are almost always better off with the new media
2) if the best you've got is "fear this new thing," we are better off without you.

That reminds me of the college acquitance acquaintance who was sure the internet was merely going to be a phase or trend. This was circa 1999, so it wasn't quite as crazy then.

Nah, it was just as crazy then.