Digital Technology

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I find myself on the optimistic side of this debate. Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, reminded me of reading Socrates’s strictures on writing and the dangers of the spread of that new technology. Much of the activities that the noble Lord attributed to modern terrorists must have been in Socrates’s mind as he was thinking of what they could do now that they had this additional skill.

When I was young, the scare was television. It probably has not done us much good one way or the other: we are probably less healthy than we were; we are probably less good at concentrating and socialising. In that context, the internet, social networks and games are a great advance. To the extent that it has been demonstrated that they do good, they increase people’s performance in short-term memory. It has been shown that in some contexts, heavy users of Facebook are actually better at off-line relationships than people who use it less. There are also research papers that tend in the other direction. The overall picture, however, is one of a revolution which is, though frightening and fast, on average benign. I side with my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood in saying that we are much better now at writing than we were 20 years ago. The world was full of reluctant letter writers when I was 30, and now it is full of keen e-mailers and bloggers. We do much more of it and we read much more of it. The effect on music—the appreciation and spread of music—seems to me to have been strongly positive.

The noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, referred to the plasticity of our brains. That is indeed one of our great characteristics. We must therefore be conscious that any great change, such as what we are experiencing, may have effects of which we ought to be careful. As she said, we ought to be doing research into this, particularly meta-studies to give us a clear picture, because individual studies will always have a scatter of results. We ought to be doing proper meta-studies to really look at the questions raised by the noble Baroness. I hope she will be sufficiently piqued by Ben Goldacre to contribute to that process herself.