Enlightenment in High Gear

[Cognitive Scientist Andy] Clark’s notions support the conjecture that smart mobs in computation-pervaded environments could enable some people to transform the way they think and the way civilization operates, the way some people used printing presses, literacy, the scientific method, and new social contracts to transform feudalism into modernism. Enlightenment rationality has its limits, but the reason it is called “the Enlightenment” is that the changes enabled by the systematic use of reason, aided by mathematics and literacy, represented a step toward a more democratic and humane world. Part of taking that step involved learning to think in new ways, aided by cognitive technologies—learning to become new kinds of humans.

It would be a mistake, Clark cautions, to try to nail “human nature” down to what humans used to be, because “ours are (by nature) unusually plastic brains whose biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of non-biological props and scaffolds. More so then any other creature on this planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures: ones whose systematic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull.”

Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs (2002) p. 208

(quoting Andy Clark, “Natural-Born Cyborgs?” in Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Technology, (ed. M. Benyon, C. Nehaniv & K. Dautenhahn (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2001), p. 17).

See also Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (2004); and edge.org/3rd_culture/clark, at page 5.

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Contrast that notion with the following:

These days, mainstream media fascination with blogs and the bloggers who love them often seems to assume that the very use of the Internet enhances the content or style of what has been written. It's a seductive cyber-fantasy. Speed is useful, and so are hyperlinks and visuals-on-demand, but—fortunately or not, depending on your point of view—there's no digital invisible hand that can move any piece of writing very far along the road to worthwhile reading.

A central paradox of the rapid advances in media technologies is that the quantum leaps in computer hard drives and software have been accompanied by an approximately zero boost in human mental capacity—or in what we refer to with such words as "insight," "wisdom," and "compassion."

Norman Solomon, "Digital Hype: A Dazzling Smokescreen?" (which I read on truthout.org Perspective (March 7, 2006), but it is apparently not archived there. Flash forward 7.18.2009.)