The value and risk of thought induced by technologies
Valentina De Angelis
The paper examines the main transformations caused by new technologies in the minds of adults and adolescents. The combination of alphabetic structures and cybernetic relations allows an exponential increase in knowledge, but submits the cognitive skills to the risks of an unprecedented and insidious illogicality of thought, especially at the levels of average intelligence. In web information, structures of meaning are not immediately recognizable while proceeding from data to system without any mediation. Interacting with computers when there are no pre-defined structures and when teen-agers are involved, may cause a cutting down of the typical models of classical logic, without any spontaneous acquisition of another complex logic with its own system of knowledge. The diminishing of logic thinking and the weakening of objective cause-effect links, produce an excessive tendency towards mythical forms of significance, while the image is not translated into a structured visual thought, but it stops at the level of perception. Linguistic expression and reasoning undergo the effects of these transformations.
Keywords
Logic, Causality, Language, Imagination.