In fact, far from making workers more productive, constantly checking emails and text messages during meetings in the evening and at weekends can significantly diminish employees' IQ, according to a study commissioned on behalf of Hewlett Packard, the supplier of computers, printers and related products and services.
[WS:] That does not surprise me at all. The devil is in the usage. A person receives far more information that the brain can process, but that information goes through many affective and cognitive filters that sort out information deemed irrelevant in a particular context, process some automatically without engaging higher cognitive functions, and use cognitive /heuristic devices to package, organize and simplify for processing what does enter the consciousness. If that process is bypassed or interrupted by electronic gizmos (or any other interruptions, for that matter), the brain must use some of its processing capacity to simply make sense out the incoming information, and separate signal from noise.
That is why people who, say, listen to music as background noise are bound to have lower intellectual capacity for other tasks. Of course most of such people are immersed in the culture of idiocy anyway, so their lower functional IQ does not matter or it is even socially desirable.
Another possible explanation is the so-called "learned helplessness" effect experimentally demonstrated some time ago. If experimental subjects were repeatedly subjected to noxious stimuli that they could not avoid (shocks, noises, smell, etc.), their cognitive capacity diminished and in some arrangements they become passive and resigned and did not even try to avoid those noxious stimuli that they could. It can be argued, that the constant bombardments by beeps, alarms, bullshit messages etc, is a form of unavoidable noxious stimuli that leads to learned helplessness.
One more comment. I find the use of email and internet intellectually stimulating - but I control most of the aspect of their use. I have filters that automatically junk all uninvited or unexpected email traffic. I am very selective what links I follow. I avoid "surfing" _ I use only those services that I can or ZI am willing to cognitively process in a meaningful way, and I turn off all background noises.
What is more, I found that email offers me a clear advantage over face to face conversation without seriously compromising the main advantage of face-to-face interaction, which is immediacy. While writing an email response I can pause, go back and edit what I wrote and say exactly what I want to say and add or remove as many emotive features as I deem necessary. However, I cannot take back and edit what I said in a face-to-face conversation. This is why I really love email lists.
This, however, is not how morons use the net, I suppose. The morons use the net and related services in the same way they use television - as something that distracts and entertains them so they can be relatively passive receptacles of the reflected light that passes through them or consumers of excitement created by someone else - as seen in "Idiocracy."
Wojtek