Are we weakening our brains through Twitter

Last week I had the opportunity to spend 2 days with people from a variety of companies that are actively pursuing the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies both internally and externally. Internally to promote knowledge sharing, increase innovation...and to retain staff (who think that this is fun and cool). Externally they are using it for marketing, accessing ideas and recruiting. In many of these companies E2.0 tools such as Blogs, Yammer, Twitter and Wikis are having a remarkable impact in all of these areas.

BUT...one of the comments we hear about the use of these technologies is ...yeah...this stuff is interesting...but are we weakening our brains though the use of tools like Twitter? Are we putting ourselves in a position where we are less likely to remember key facts -- or where we have such short attention spans that we can never accomplish anything significant?

In a recent post in Salon.com author and English professor Dennis Baron, from the University of Illinois, talks about this phenomena and his new book "A better pencil." In the book he puts this discussion into a historical perspective.

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

In our teaching at Cal State North Ridge in the KM distance learning program we are finding that these tools increase both the connections between faculty and students as well as learning. Students not only "learn from the faculty," but equally importantly they share their experiences and knowledge with each other using these social media tools. Based on what we are seeing these tools are not handicapping our students, they are enhancing the learning experience. Just as writing did for Plato and his students, movable type did for Gutenberg and millions of readers of books and the computer has done for Job's and millions around the world these new tools are allowing us to more easily communicate and learn.