For some years now\u00a0Private Eye\u2019s \u2018Dumb Britain\u2019 section has been regaling its readers with examples of contestants giving ridiculous and risible answers to questions on television quiz shows. You know the kind of thing, the fabulously stupid things people say when asked, say, who succeeded Henry VIII as the king of England \u2013 with David Lammy on his 2008 Mastermind appearance responding \u2018Henry VII\u2019.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no wonder you see people neurotically clutching these devices all hours of the day<\/p>\n
Yet we might not be laughing for much longer, and\u00a0Private Eye\u00a0might be forced to jettison that column altogether, if we are to believe Jeremy Vine. Writing in the new edition of\u00a0Radio Times, the former\u00a0Eggheads\u00a0presenter warns that the television quiz show\u2019s days are numbered, because the smartphone is killing off our willingness or capacity to retain information and store general knowledge.<\/p>\n
The forthcoming demise of the TV quiz show format, cautions Vine, will be symptomatic of a far greater and graver malaise. \u2018The more we lean on smartphones, the dumber we become,\u2019 he writes. \u2018For people born after 1990, the idea of knowing something is the same as knowing where to find it. Extend the analogy, and someone with a mobile needs to know nothing at all.\u2019<\/p>\n
He is right of course. It\u2019s obvious, because we have seen what has happens when we outsource our brains to technology. In the wake of the pocket calculator having become commonplace in the 1970s, more than one generation of human beings has become functionally innumerate. With the subsequent dawn of contactless payments in a virtually cashless society, many today have barely any concept of numbers.<\/p>\n
After calculators came computer spellcheckers or other writing aids. The upshot of that development is that most of us never have to look up \u2018narcissism\u2019 or \u2018liaison\u2019 or know intuitively the difference between \u2018principle\u2019 with \u2018principal\u2019. Thanks to ChatGPT and even newer advances in AI technology, many people are hardly composing essays or articles by themselves at all. The result is a colloquial English that is becoming more bland and more homogenous. Lazy methods, unsurprisingly, are begetting lazy prose.<\/p>\n
The advent of the smartphone has accelerated the whole trend. In the name of convenience, in bestowing our cognitive processes to machines, we have rendered ourselves both more stupid and more dependent. What with the use of paper maps having plummeted, and the custom of planning long journeys in advance also having disappeared, many have no sense of direction, no feeling for the topography of where they live, or indeed any notion of where they happen to be.<\/p>\n
This was brought home to me when an acquaintance recently came to my town on the East Kent coast while house-hunting. He seemed to like the place, and other places he had visited nearby, yet it soon became apparent that he had little idea whereabouts in England he actually was. His whole journey had been enabled and performed by his Satnav and his smartphone.<\/p>\n
The same goes for those who travel abroad, taking them from one identikit airport to another, having had their whole schedule prepared for them by electronic proxy. The consequence is that, presented with a globe, most wouldn\u2019t be able to point to where they had just been. This new reality is made abundantly clear on Richard Osman\u2019s\u00a0House of Games, a television quiz for global-trotting celebrities who invariably haven\u2019t the faintest idea where to identify on a map Cyprus or Stockholm or even Leicestershire (let alone know how to spell it).<\/p>\n
Smartphones have had a similar effect on foreign language learning, with many travellers assuming they can by-pass the laborious method altogether. Google Translate has become the first and last resort for most. Thanks to this invention, and thanks to other advances in technology over recent decades, a growing swathe of the population are not only innumerate, illiterate, ignorant, uninformed about the world around them and unaware as to where they actually are, but can\u2019t even say \u2018good afternoon\u2019 in Spanish.<\/p>\n
This dumbing down process is not only depressing and concerning, given that ours has already been dubbed the first \u2018post-literate\u2019 society, the temptation to outsource the human brain is also one fraught with peril. The ultimate problem is that once this surrogate technology is removed from your hands, once you misplace or break your smartphone, you are rendered dangerously vulnerable. You won\u2019t be able to find your way home if you\u2019re lost, speak to a local if you need urgent help in a country where not everyone speaks English. You won\u2019t be able to phone home because no-one knows any telephone numbers by heart anymore.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no wonder you see people neurotically clutching these devices all hours of the day. One of the few remaining autonomous, fully-functioning parts of their brain is constantly telling these people that they would be lost without them \u2013 literally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For some years now\u00a0Private Eye\u2019s \u2018Dumb Britain\u2019 section has been regaling its readers with examples of contestants giving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2306,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-480834","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}