Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

Review of Manfred Spitzer, Digitale Demenz. Wie wir uns und unsere Kinder um den Verstand bringen, Droemer Knaur, Munich 2012; It. trans. Demenza digitale. Come la nuova tecnologia ci rende stupidi, Corbaccio, Milan 2013.

Technology is usually fairly neutral.
It’s like a hammer, which can be used to build a house
or to destroy someone’s home.
The hammer doesn’t care.
It is almost always up to us to determine
whether the technology is good or bad.
Noam Chomsky

The fourth revolution, that of the infosphere, of onlife, of uninterrupted communication, began a long time ago now, even though it was given a name only recently (Floridi, 2014). Daily we witness a transformation of work, of study, of social relationships, of our everyday lives, such as had never occurred before. For this reason, because of the change in our habits, because of the pervasiveness of technology in our lives, but also because of everything positive and useful that technology has to offer, opinions differ sharply as to whether all this is a good thing. The distance between those convinced that the opportunity for progress before us is not to be repeated, and those who instead see in the spread of computers and smartphones a calamity for humanity, grows ever wider: Umberto Eco’s old distinction (it was 1964) between the apocalyptic and the integrated still seems apt.

A neo-apocalyptic thinker is certainly Manfred Spitzer, a German psychiatrist, a scholar of the neurosciences and the author of numerous essays on the impact, terrifying, in his view, that the new technologies have on our lives, and above all on the lives of the younger generations.

In his 2012 book Digitale Demenz (“Digital Dementia”), translated into Italian in 2013 (331 pages) and published by Corbaccio (Garzanti), Spitzer sets out his catastrophic view of the effects that the new technologies are having, and will have, on our lives.

The German scholar’s greatest concern is for the younger generations: memory, attention, patience, listening, silence, reasoning, reading, reflection, depth, these seem by now words tied to the past, today so often giving way to superficiality, speed, frenzy, inattention, simultaneous communication, to an entirely new way of working, studying and learning.

As Spitzer notes, it is true that the digital media are by now part of our culture, they “boost our productivity, make life easier and represent an important instrument of entertainment”, but to base one’s education entirely on the Internet and on the digital does not seem to him the best solution, especially for those of school age. Indeed, the epochal change seems to have reshaped our lives from top to bottom, even though we are perhaps the people least fitted to judge it, since we have lived through this shift in the light of the old, pre-revolution ways of life, and are therefore conditioned by them (for the younger generations, in fact, nothing has changed, since today’s young people were born into a digital society). In the digital world one observes an ever more pervasive use of social networks. Spitzer, oddly, devotes ample space to the problems, undoubtedly important, but not fundamental here, of cyberbullying and of the online anonymity connected with social networks, singled out as the cause of dangerous phenomena such as mobbing on the Internet, while he devotes only a few lines (although he is the author of other books on the subject) to other issues bound up with “social life on the screen”, such as loneliness and alienation (Turkle, 2011; Mazzucchelli, 2014), by now acknowledged products of the new online communication, which condition our lives to an astonishing degree and which do, by contrast, give cause for some serious concern.

The fact is that today, in the 11-to-25 age bracket, almost half of all young people spend around six hours of their day on the web, and Internet addiction is by now recognised as a disorder linked to the intensive, obsessive use of digital technology and above all of smartphones. Yet this concerns not only adolescents but almost every age group: we check our email inbox and the notifications of our instant-messaging apps with a frantic zeal, we do not disdain the odd online game, and we are active, often to no purpose, on social networks, where we frequently prefer virtual relationships to those conducted in person. The days go by with our gaze fixed constantly on a screen. Spitzer asks: “Is this really what we want for ourselves and for our children?”. Dementia and mental decline in general, the German psychiatrist’s objects of study, would appear to be closely bound up with the functional capacity of the mind which, as we know, must be trained through constant physical and mental work; and it is well, Spitzer says, that mental work should go together with a sound education. How are we to get the best out of technology without becoming its slaves? The scholar stresses that young people today are born into a world that already, of itself, makes massive use of digital technologies, and that they have no idea how, in times past, a friendship was struck up, a history project was researched, or a game was joined; moreover, recent research shows, unlike in the 1980s, when it was held that students who used a computer to study performed better at school, that today the findings show exactly the opposite: digital technologies are used mainly to play and to communicate, and all this takes time away from study and creates a climate of inattention and fragmentation, of precarious and hurried preparation. As Piattelli Palmarini pointed out a long time ago, many misgivings about the use of the PC in the classroom were raised even by the United States Department of Education, which had already noted that there is no difference in academic attainment between students who have digital technologies at their disposal, indeed, very often the digital environment worsens students’ performance. According to the “Making the Connection” report, published in 2015 by the OECD (http://www.oecd.org/publications/students-computers-and-learning-9789264239555-en.htm), massive access to the Internet worsens students’ conditions for learning, whereas moderate access improves them.

One interesting aspect examined in the book is the habit our students have today of reproducing content through that mode of text composition known as “copy and paste”. As Carlo Giovannella has aptly explained, “today almost all of the research assignments given to students, at any level, generate a more or less elaborate reproduction of sources found on the web, and so far little harm done, since one has to begin somewhere. The trouble is that, very often, the results of the research are presented as the fruit of the student’s own ingenuity”. Setting aside the admittedly serious misappropriation of others’ work, Giovannella continues, the far graver consequences of this mode of reproduction are the loss of the ability to express oneself in one’s own language, the inability to develop connections and integrations among “objects of knowledge”, and the withering of critical capacity. But copy and paste, Spitzer reminds us, “is a function so widespread that we no longer even remember how, in the past, one used to write a letter or a book without such a facility”; and he reminds us, on the strength of experiments and examples, that the more deeply a piece of content is worked over, the better it is committed to memory. Learning and memory go hand in hand, but the number of synapses involved in a given process of memorising content depends precisely on the depth of that working-over: the more sustained the level of concentration and the greater the attention, the easier it will be to recall the words. Now, with the Internet, the “copy and paste” procedure is extraordinarily well suited to what Spitzer calls “the superficiality of the digital media”, an abyss that is drawing today’s society towards the total loss of the very concept of competence, from primary school to university[1], robbing the human being of mental work, the fundamental step in learning. “Which of us does not indulge in ‘downloading’ texts, images and whole manuscripts onto our laptop, or onto the desktop computer, after giving them no more than a cursory glance? I shall read them in due course, we tell ourselves, knowing in part that we are deceiving ourselves. When one went to the library, whether the punitive, European-style institution or the flexible, always-open, American-style text bank, one at least read the passage in question attentively, in order to decide whether or not to undertake the laborious business of photocopying it. Before photocopiers existed, some thousand psychological years ago, one took notes and filled out index cards. Today a single click is enough, it is enough to store the web address, and then ‘we shall come back to it’. Youngsters are no more diligent than we are; they too click and file away, instead of reading and digesting” (Piattelli Palmarini, 2007). As Longo has noted, in fact, the network is not merely the transmission and distribution of data: “it is also a metaphor for contemporary culture, a culture devoid of organisation and of any strong hierarchical structure, one that has replaced learning with documentation, and study with consultation”. The step that follows consultation, the “saving” onto a magnetic medium, seems to have disastrous consequences for us and for our mental activity.

Turning the discussion to video games, always a much-debated subject in educational circles, Spitzer inveighs against the world of electronic and online gaming, albeit with a certain conceptual difficulty and a few gaps. The scholar takes aim at violent video games, held to be the cause of aggressive attitudes in the young, but from there he tries to condemn the entire world of video games, when we know, from most of the scientific literature on the subject, that many digital play environments are put to educational use, not least the use of video games and of so-called edutainment (education + entertainment) in specific learning disorders and in the field of special educational needs generally. Recently the contribution of video games to learning has been highlighted with reference to research that appeared in “Agenda Digitale”. From the studies reported there, the use of gamified platforms in processes of training and teaching tells us that learners acquire on average 11% more concrete knowledge, 14% more skills based on the knowledge just acquired, and manage to retain about 10% more information over the long term. “Video games make learning more effective and meaningful: they foster motivation by giving recognition and rewards in real time, through enjoyment; they make it possible to create engaging scenarios which, the more they simulate reality, the more effective they are in terms of meaningful learning; they rest on educational aims that can be personalised and modulated, once the learners’ needs have been clearly and correctly analysed; and they allow for better and more effective assessment and self-assessment” (Maurizio, 2020). Spitzer’s observation regarding non-violent electronic play is confined to the time lost in front of screens, but here his criticisms fail to find any other negative side, beyond the banal remark that more time spent gaming corresponds to unsatisfactory school performance, whereas a boundless series of studies brings to light some important benefits, such as the strengthening of one’s aptitude for problem solving, creativity and critical thinking as products of the use of games on the console or on any other electronic device (Maurizio, 2020).

In the last part of the book, Spitzer tries to sketch a profile of the digital natives, those youngsters who, according to Prensky’s celebrated definition, are the generation of young people who are “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. According to the German psychiatrist, the digital native, perpetually online, is in constant contact with friends or relatives by email, text message or social network. Certainly, the fact of having condensed a whole range of possible applications within a mobile device such as the smartphone has brought about a very close relationship between user and device. And by the age of twenty-one (according to a 2008 study cited in the book), checking the phone once every 11 minutes, the digital native has already “sent 250,000 emails or text messages, spent 10,000 hours on the mobile phone, played 5,000 hours of video games, spent 3,500 hours on social networks” (though today we may well imagine these figures have lately grown a good deal larger); “the alarm clock is replaced by the mobile phone; before getting up, the young person checks the messages received; in the evening he sends his last text at around 11 p.m. and is lulled to sleep by the music of the iPod […] the lifestyle of a digital native cannot but have consequences”. And the consequences Spitzer identifies are, as one may imagine, catastrophic: young people today, deeming the traditional methods of learning obsolete and superfluous, will be unable to remember anything, will not even know how to look for information online, will spend the greater part of their time and energy exchanging messages or entertaining and distracting themselves, and will be incapable of reflection and dependent on the network and on their mobile equipment. They will read an e-book without knowing the pleasure of leafing through a paper book and, given the aforementioned bent of the Google Generation for “copy-and-paste”, will not complete the hermeneutic circle of understanding: clicking here and there uncritically, without ever returning to a reliable source, they will search horizontally (that is to say, superficially) rather than vertically (without going into any depth).

Alongside all this, young people today, as is well known, love to carry out several tasks at once, according to that mode of work organisation known as “multitasking”. The term is borrowed precisely from computing, which sees in this operating mode the capacity of an operating system to advance the activity of several applications within the same span of time. For digital natives, by contrast, it is a kind of strategy for managing one’s own cognitive resources, one that makes it possible to face the complexity and breadth of the tasks to be carried out by, in effect, dividing one’s thoughts among the various “tasks” to be brought to completion. Spitzer is, naturally, highly critical of this strategy: distraction, the continual passage from one activity to another, the precariousness of concentration, place the multitasker in a condition of superficiality and ineffectiveness. Yet multitasking is, according to some, “an activity lost in the mists of time, bound up with the human being’s innate capacity to distribute its resources (cognitive control) according to the activities to be performed, and to manage automated activities (walking upright and using the eyes, for instance) that make no excessive demands, alongside activities that, by contrast, call for resources useful in focusing attention and making choices. The decision as to how to distribute these resources rests with the individual, even if, in order to obtain the desired results, that individual must always reckon with the mental processes that make his choices and decisions possible. What will determine the success or otherwise of the practice of multitasking is the ability to retrieve the necessary resources and information, and to pass rapidly from one activity to another without causing any interference (distracting elements) that might block one of the many activities under way, or render it impossible” (Mazzucchelli, 2017). This, on the other hand, might well be one of those very exercises of the mind that Spitzer himself speaks of when he refers to activities that could, in some way, guard against forms of dementia. The acceptable side of the German neuroscientist’s observations is that a grave misconception has spread through contemporary society: the belief that young people can learn without effort and with minimal attention. It is believed that one can serenely learn while having fun, but, as we know, to know demands constant commitment and effort to be spent. For Spitzer, “the depth of mental work needed for learning has been replaced by digital superficiality”.

In conclusion, many of the criticisms Spitzer levels at the new media seem the fruit of enormous prejudice against the digital world; it is nonetheless true that the world of education often appears to fall prey to the great multinationals of social networks, gaming, entertainment and distributed computing, which seek to spread their machines and devices by trading on the notion that the digital revolution is a unique opportunity for the school and for us all, yet it is not by seeking to do away with all this, without good reason, that one obtains anything truly useful to our present-day society. Spitzer holds a small disappointment in store for us in the book’s final chapter, entitled “What is to be done?”. His prescriptions for rebalancing the asymmetry between the pervasiveness of technology and the ordinariness of our lives come down to a vision that swings from statements of the kind “the digital media are part of our culture … they boost our productivity, make life easier … the world would be bound to collapse without a digital processing of information … it is not a matter of fighting them or eliminating them” to considerations such as “they damage the organism … the brain withers … in digital natives mental performance is below average”, by way of advice that is agreeable enough but that here seems out of place, “eat healthily … listen to music … sing … devote half an hour a day to movement … help others … smile … money does not bring happiness … simplify your life”, down to the definitive “avoid the digital media”, which appears in the closing pages of the book. Regrettably, no consideration whatsoever has been given to the prospect of media education, which for a long time now has held a prominent place in school curricula and in educational research, and which would certainly be a sound setting in which to try to restore to technology its role as a simple support for human activities. The younger generations must be supported in such a way that they can develop critical and responsible thinking with regard to the media, without on that account renouncing the many advantages technology offers, for young people today have the right to know the reality that surrounds them. Perhaps, rather than destroying everything that has to do with technology, it would therefore be better to insist on media literacy within the school, orienting the young towards a conscious use of the many tools available today. Some of the blemishes of the digital revolution reported by Spitzer, such as insomnia, depression and various addictions, might, moreover, be problems immanent in our society rather than in the digital media. We do not yet know whether we suffer from loneliness and therefore turn to social networks to fill a void, or whether the networks themselves foster a kind of isolation from relationships conducted in person. The new digital technologies have made communication, whether simultaneous or deferred, far easier, but it is equally true that many of the observations Spitzer makes about the digital media refer to real problems that are still unresolved, or not even investigated. The uninterrupted use of tools such as televisions, DVD players and tablets, as well as robots, whose consumption by the younger generations has long been on the rise, can have a negative influence on learning, and Spitzer rightly underlines the importance, in the age of development, of active learning, of fine motor skills, of the com-prehension of the world, of acting within one’s environment, as opposed to being passive before a computer screen, of the use of the pencil in place of keyboard and mouse. The research cited in Spitzer’s book asserts that visual media, in early childhood, are not only useless but seriously inhibit the capacity to learn: small children who watch DVDs and/or television with a certain frequency know markedly fewer words than the peers who go through life keeping these tools at a certain distance. Adolescents, ever more taken up with online life, seem to have even fewer occasions to form real friendships, paradoxically for “lack of time”, the very time that is so often devoted to tending one’s online image and one’s virtual relationships.

Spitzer’s book rightly underlines certain ways of using digital technologies that may prove risky for the young; yet it is precisely in the age of formation that the birth of a critical spirit is of value, along with an awareness of the correct use of the possibilities and resources that technological development offers present-day society. The goal of our society, in educational terms, remains in any case that of establishing what lends meaning and advantage to the formation of the younger generations. And so it may be useful to take up once more the maxim of Noam Chomsky, quoted as an epigraph, according to which technology is neutral: it resembles a hammer, which can be used both to build a house and to pull it down, remembering that it almost always rests with us to decide the use, good or bad, that we wish to make of it.

References

Floridi L. The Fourth Revolution. How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014.

Giovannella C. Il “copia-incolla” come stile di vita: ecco perché la scuola deve intervenire, https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/il-copia-incolla-come-stile-di-vita-ecco-perche-la-scuola-deve-intervenire/

Longo G.O. Il nuovo Golem. Come il computer cambia la nostra cultura, Laterza, Bari 1998.

Mazzucchelli C. La solitudine del social networker, Delos Digital, 2014 (ebook)

Mazzucchelli C. 100 strategie analogiche per resistere al digitale (e allo smartphone), 2017 (ebook)

Maurizio C. Didattica, così i videogame aiutano l’apprendimento, https://www.agendadigitale.eu/scuola-digitale/didattica-cosi-i-videogame-accendono-lapprendimento/

Piattelli Palmarini M. Contrordine: il pc non aiuta a studiare, “Corriere della Sera”, 15 May 2007

Turkle S. Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, New York 2011; It. trans. Insieme ma soli. Perché ci aspettiamo sempre più dalla tecnologia e sempre meno dagli altri, Codice Edizioni, Turin 2012.

Massimo Capponi is a tenured university researcher (Ricercatore Confermato) at the University of Perugia; he teaches Computer Science Applied to Education in the degree programme in Educational Sciences.