The Internet is not making us dumb

There was an article by the journalist Janice Turner a while ago in the London Times.  It was stimulated by the statistic that in Britain the average teenager now spends more time on-line, whether by phone, tablet or even PC, than they do sleeping, or watching TV, and reverts to the venerable question: "Is the internet making us dumb (or dumber)?"    Of course this is an impossible question to research since it would be now totally impractical to create a test group of children without on-line exposure and compare them to a group typical of the iphone and ipad generation.  And anyway how do you define and measure 'dumbness'? 

Rather one presumes this article was a reproach to young people to switch off their devices sometimes, and get out there and 'get a life'.  This may be reasonable in Europe where there is a bewildering choice of sporting, cultural, theatrical, festival activities and movies available more or less 24/7, in every area, and clubs and groups devoted to every interest.

But let us rather consider Windhoek, which has, at time of writing so far as I know, uniquely among the world's capital cities except maybe in Saudi Arabia:

• No movie house (even the small one in Swakop seems to have vanished)
• No Indian restaurant
• No Chinese restaurant (there are a couple of small take-aways)
• No public library (there was one I think, which was refurbished and reopened but was again closed due to enterprising customers coming in the evening and using its secluded corners for sex)
• No specifically child-friendly facilities or activities
• No Sunday newspaper, except for the one imported from South Africa

and think what we (the lucky ones, with network connection) would do without the internet, and how boring life was before its arrival here.  Now we can read whatever international newspaper we want, any day, any time, we can download any music or movie we want (pace DSTV) and watch or listen to it at any time, we can find any of ten of thousands of recipes we would never find in any cookbook, we can post all al pictures online and never lose another photograph, we can keep in touch with any or all of our friends, and tweet our opinions on any subject via the social media (whereas before it could take years to track down an old school friend) play on-line games with anyone in the world, find the most obscure information or quotation with a couple of swipes or clicks (whereas before it might takes days to find an encyclopaedia in a library).

No, for us, the internet is not make us dumb.  We would be exceedingly dumb without it, and giving network access to all our population is a necessity for national development.