Does Technology Make Us Smarter or Dumber?

It would seem only logical that technology would give people the tools and resources to expand our knowledge and become smarter than previous generations. Statistics show that students in the United States are scoring higher on test. SAT math scores have reached record highs and they have been steadily increasing since 1972. The United States government keeps track of student progress through the years and in the Nations Report Card they came to the conclusion that there has been improvement in reading and math test scores since keeping track in 1973 . The U.S. Census Bureau has been recording the percentage of high school and college graduates since 1960 and there has been a significant increase. These statistics prove Americans are getting smarter and it’s technology that is helping us achieve this.

As test scores are getting higher so are the amount of households that have a computer. The U.S. Census Bureau has data showing that in 1985 only 8.5% of households had computers compared to 2001 in which 51% of the households had computers . It also may be said that record math scores may be linked with the consumer release of the first graphing calculator in 1985.

There are those who feel technology is actually making people dumb, that we rely on it so much that we have become mentally lazy. There are college professors that insist kids growing up with social networking sites will not be able to communicate properly in public face to face situations . In a 2009 article in “Psychology Today” author John Robinson proclaims that not memorizing knowledge and relying on the internet instead makes us stupid.

It comes to the argument then does the source of knowledge have to come from ones own brain to define someone as smart? In an article from “ Discover Magazine” entitled How Google Is Making Us Smarter author Carl Zimmer references two philosophers that claim the human brain is able to make the world and our brains an extension of itself. There is a new computer term called “ in the clouds” which allows small computers like netbooks to have very little internal memory because it’s expected the user will store most of their data online. Our brains can work the same way in which we store data on outside sources but we can access it just like accessing our own memory. At the University of Southern California neural engineer Ted Berger is developing microchips for the brain to store memory, initially for Alzheimer patients, but the implications for all people to increase our own ability to store and download knowledge to a chip in our brain is there.

The data alone of higher test scores associated with more technology in the household proves that people are getting smarter. Knowledge is the same no matter where it is stored, as long as it can be accessed. And we can access so much more today, and even more tomorrow. We are smarter.