When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
LES ECHOS

Do Smart Phones Make Us Dumber? Asking The Internet's Intelligence Questions

"Zombification" at work?
"Zombification" at work?
Benoît Georges

PARIS - Do the Internet and digital devices make us happier and more efficient. Or do they just make us less intelligent?

Two new books try to answer the question asked by Nichols Carr in The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Italian linguist Raffaele Simone and French philosopher Jean-Michel Besnier deliver very different views on the matter.

According to Simone, modern men and women are “caught in the Web,” absorbed in the “media sphere”, which he describes as an “environment in which online electronic media play a fundamental role,” and create, “from nothing, trends, needs and new pressures.”

It can be annoying – or amusing – to watch the frenzy with which other people handle their smartphones and tablets. The author asks himself “in which depths were buried this spectacular need to communicate that we have been observing around the world since the cell phone was invented?”

The problem is that the Web has a great impact on our intelligence. According to Simone, we are currently in the middle of the “third phase” of knowledge acquisition. The first phase was when we started writing; the second phase was the invention of the printing press. There is one difference – both those phases relied on text, while the third phase is dominated by images and sounds.

Written knowledge allows thoughts to be structured and more complex than oral communications. It is based on a specific form of intelligence Simone called “sequential” – meaning the way we assimilate new information, one after the other. The Web and videos, on the other hand, favor a “simultaneous” form of intelligence – we are capable of taking in different types of information at the same time but without “being able to put them in order as a logical succession, with hierarchy.”

While there is text on digital devices, it has multiple forms: It’s copied, pasted and constantly re-written – it gets “dissolved,” says Simone. In the end, the automatic and systematic filing of data (photo, video, audio and textual) leads to a paradoxical mass “amnesia,” when we ask the search engines to do the tasks our memory are supposed to do, we deeply modify our capacity to remember things.

Operator or zombie?

Our tendency to use electronic tools for skills that used to be considered essential is what The Simplified Man, Jean-Michel Besnier’s latest book is all about. Using the example of interactive voice response (IVR) systems that have replaced customer services, he asks a simple question: “How does the cultured species that we are, born from the Age of Enlightenment and having witnessed totalitarianism, let itself become a slave to its machines?”

The situations in which we delegate our responsibility to objects or programs are multiplying: Search engines algorithms decide which websites best match our needs; the so called “service” robots that are supposed to take better care than us of the elderly or autistic children; the GPS navigators without which we are completely lost…

Drawing from literature (George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Fritz Zorn, etc.) and philosophy (Plato, Hannah Arendt, etc.), Besnier believes this dehumanization existed long before computers. According to him, the industrial revolution – that transformed men into operators of machines that were more powerful than them – was already part of this movement.

In the end, Jean-Michel Besnier draws a rather bleak perspective. Far for liberating us, the technological society denies us the awareness of being unique – which leads to depression and “zombification.”

Simone is less adamant. While he believes that “it might be beneficial to admit we have irrevocably lost some forms of knowledge,” he doesn’t think it’s possible “to anticipate what will happen to the new forms of knowledge being created.”

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Economy

Lex Tusk? How Poland’s Controversial "Russian Influence" Law Will Subvert Democracy

The new “lex Tusk” includes language about companies and their management. But is this likely to be a fair investigation into breaking sanctions on Russia, or a political witch-hunt in the business sphere?

Photo of President of the Republic of Poland Andrzej Duda

Polish President Andrzej Duda

Piotr Miaczynski, Leszek Kostrzewski

-Analysis-

WARSAW — Poland’s new Commission for investigating Russian influence, which President Andrzej Duda signed into law on Monday, will be able to summon representatives of any company for inquiry. It has sparked a major controversy in Polish politics, as political opponents of the government warn that the Commission has been given near absolute power to investigate and punish any citizen, business or organization.

And opposition politicians are expected to be high on the list of would-be suspects, starting with Donald Tusk, who is challenging the ruling PiS government to return to the presidency next fall. For that reason, it has been sardonically dubbed: Lex Tusk.

University of Warsaw law professor Michal Romanowski notes that the interests of any firm can be considered favorable to Russia. “These are instruments which the likes of Putin and Orban would not be ashamed of," Romanowski said.

The law on the Commission for examining Russian influences has "atomic" prerogatives sewn into it. Nine members of the Commission with the rank of secretary of state will be able to summon virtually anyone, with the powers of severe punishment.

Under the new law, these Commissioners will become arbiters of nearly absolute power, and will be able to use the resources of nearly any organ of the state, including the secret services, in order to demand access to every available document. They will be able to prosecute people for acts which were not prohibited at the time they were committed.

Their prerogatives are broader than that of the President or the Prime Minister, wider than those of any court. And there is virtually no oversight over their actions.

Nobody can feel safe. This includes companies, their management, lawyers, journalists, and trade unionists.

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch

The latest