Envelopes and Smartphones: The Culprits in Our Long Cognitive Decline
I spend a lot of time turning features off on my devices.
Partly, this is because I’m teetering on the edge of paranoid privacy freak. Partly, it’s because these bells and whistles are atrophying our skills. Shakes fist!
Maps. Spell check. TIME KEEPING. My boyfriend is atrocious at both distance (at a walking/running scale) and time (at a minutes scale) estimations which I choose to blame on an over-reliance on digital tools and not some innate shortcoming on his part. Cannot estimate time cookies have been in oven to save life.
I also refuse to use plant identification apps preferring to learn their taxonomies instead, and have “won” friendly competitions to visually estimate the radii of dinner plates. I can also tell the difference between tap and bottled by taste. I am a woman of many talents.
You might say this is silly and who needs to be able to estimate the radii of dinner plates with their eyeballs, or the time it would take to walk from your house to the eye of the storm based on seconds between lightning and thunder. You might not be wrong. But when the apocalypse or — for those of us on sensitive electrical grids — just a big ol’ ice storm arrives, what are we going to do without basic life skills like, I don’t know, celestial navigation or plant identification or time the cookies have been in the oven, if you can’t do those things without your phone?
These feel like endemically new and novel problems, brought about by the onslaught of “there’s an app for that” culture, which often makes me feel like an aggressive Luddite who Hates Progress and Technology.
But I was reading this very mind-bending article about letter-locking and (in conjunction with my complete inability to do origami) realized the world-shifting innovation of envelopes — and affordable paper — were about as bad for our spatial cognition as our smartphones/digital ecosystems are for our ability to read maps, time-keep, spell, and think critically.
As a society, we have basically completely lost this cognitive skill set. And dire warning, we are in the process of losing many others.
As the article points out, in the olden days, anyone and everyone that was writing letters was also locking them. Something adjacent to this skill set seems to persist in elementary and middle school kids who have mastered folding single pieces of paper into fortune tellers and tucked-in-square notes and paper footballs, and are notably also the only demographic whose day-to-day incorporates the legacy of the Black Plague (i.e. Ring Around the Rosy). Do they have some direct line to medieval Europe that the rest of us are missing?
Kids aside, the cognitive ability to orient and reorient in abstract 3D space while retaining an anchor or reference point seems to have gotten completely lost. I can’t even imagine executing, let alone inventing, folding techniques like this. And upon reflection, during the time of the Great Envelope Revolution, I am sure there were anti-progress haters like me lamenting the loss of intricate letter-folding and cutting techniques as the (beginning of the) end of human intelligence, the end of our ability to keep our secrets safe without relying on Big Envelope. Also shakes fist!
And I’m sure they wrote their lamentations down and tucked them safely into an envelope for safekeeping, just as I write mine and send them to the cloud for — well, digital posterity, I guess.
