Have We Become Stupider?

The question “Has the world become stupider?” frequently returns in contemporary debates about digital media, search engines, and social networks. On the surface, it seems simple. Yet behind it lies a deeper issue concerning the very nature of knowledge: how it is produced, how it is transmitted, and how it is consumed.

Perhaps “Have we become stupider?” is not the most accurate question. A better one might be: Is knowledge still being transmitted in a way that allows it to be understood and made productive?

Do most readers still go back to the original texts? Or do they turn instead to summaries and to what is said about those texts through material circulating among readers?

One key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the work of British psychologist Frederic Bartlett, who conducted a series of experiments in the 1930s on what he called “serial reproduction.”

In these experiments, one person would be asked to hear a story and then retell it to someone else, who would in turn retell it to a third person, and so on. The results were striking: with each new transmission, the story was not conveyed as it had originally been told, but was reformulated. Some details were omitted, others were exaggerated, and still others were replaced by elements that better suited the recipient’s background, experience, and culture. By the time the chain had passed through enough people, the original story had become something entirely different.

This simple model reveals a fundamental truth: memory is not a neutral container, but a mechanism of reconstruction. When knowledge passes through multiple intermediaries, it is not “preserved” but “reproduced.” Here we begin to see the resemblance to our contemporary world, and with it the fear that we may be becoming stupider.

In the age of digital media, knowledge no longer travels through oral transmission, but through chains of mediation: an article is summarized, then quoted, then reposted as a short post, before being further reduced to a sentence or a headline. In this context, we might borrow a metaphor that appeared in a journalistic text: a library whose books are gradually replaced by summaries, then by summaries of summaries, until the reader is left facing layer upon layer of reduction. We might call this the “raccoon chain”: the raccoon does not read the original, but rummages through what remains of it.

It is worth clarifying that the choice of the “raccoon” is not arbitrary. The metaphor symbolically condenses a cognitive condition that is becoming increasingly entrenched. This animal, which lives on the fringes of cities and rummages through garbage bins, does not produce its own food but feeds on the leftovers of what others have produced. Despite its practical intelligence and its ability to pry things apart, pick through them, and seize what is useful, it does not understand what lies before it. It treats things simply as material available for immediate use.

This is what knowledge begins to look like in an age of serial reduction: texts are shortened, then shortened again, until all that remains are scraps of meaning, rearranged and circulated without any genuine connection to their source. At that point, we have not merely moved away from the original. We have entered a new phase in the production of information or knowledge, in which the cognitive actor is no longer a reader or a thinker, but a collector of fragments of meaning who redistributes them in forms designed for rapid consumption. “Raccoon culture,” then, is not merely a description of superficiality. It is an accurate description of the degradation of the knowledge chain itself: from creation to summary, from understanding to formal processing, from ideas to something resembling only their faded trace.

Yet this phenomenon cannot be understood apart from the technological structure that governs it. Here Marshall McLuhan becomes relevant, with his famous formulation: “The medium is the message.” The problem lies not only in content, but also in the form through which that content is transmitted. Contemporary digital media do not simply convey information. They reshape it according to the logic of speed, condensation, and fragmentation. Long texts become unsuitable for consumption, while an idea becomes acceptable only if it can be compressed into a few shareable lines.

This transformation produces a striking paradox: we live in a time when access to knowledge is no longer difficult. It is excessively easy. And with that excessive ease comes what might be called a “cognitive illusion”: reading a brief passage or a quick summary can be enough to make a person feel that they have grasped an idea. Yet this feeling of possession is not necessarily accompanied by deep understanding, or by the ability to reconstruct or critique that knowledge. This is where we encounter what might be called the “semi-educated”: people who possess the signs of knowledge but not its structure, its vocabulary but not its internal logic.

The problem becomes even more complex when viewed through the lens of attention. Instead of remaining in a state of sustained concentration, as in traditional reading or prolonged reflection, the mind now exists under continuous informational bombardment: notifications, clips, headlines, and successive waves of content. This does not merely fragment attention. It reshapes it according to a logic of constant jumping between short units of meaning, rather than the gradual and cumulative construction of an idea.

I am reminded here of a joke that we used to tell and that was widely circulated during the days of popular demonstrations. It vividly illustrates the process of reduction and reshaping of content. After the occupation of Palestine, many popular demonstrations took to the streets chanting, “Down with the Balfour Declaration!” The joke was that by the end of the demonstration, the slogan had become, in Arabic, “Let one fall from above,” a completely different phrase that retained something of the original slogan’s rhythm and sound.

This image may help bring us closer to what happens in everyday language when knowledge is transformed into short messages that are collectively repeated.

A demonstration begins with a precise political slogan. Through repetition, collective immersion, and sonic rhythm, it gradually turns into a completely different formula. The new version may preserve the rhythm and emotional charge of the original, while losing its meaning and original significance. What remains is no longer the meaning, but the emotional energy of the phrase. Here, in another form, we encounter what Bartlett observed: what matters is not merely what was said, but how it was retold and how it was reinterpreted within a changing social context.

If we bring these strands together, we might say that what we are experiencing today is not so much a “collapse of intelligence” as a transformation in the conditions under which intelligence operates. The human mind has not changed radically, but the environment in which it functions has changed profoundly: from an environment that allowed slow accumulation to one that imposes the rapid and fragmented reproduction of knowledge. This transformation creates a permanent tension between two kinds of thinking: reflective thought, which requires time, and rapid thought, which demands an immediate response.

Seen in this light, the question “Have we become stupider?” is partly misleading. It may be more accurate to say that we are increasingly exposed to conditions that make deep thinking less stable, or less possible, and knowledge more vulnerable to fragmentation and recycling.

As for stupidity, if the term can be used, it may not be a quality of the mind at all, but rather a side effect and a characteristic of the cultural structure that has emerged. It is a technology that reshapes our relationship with the world.

Thus, rather than seeing this as a decline in human capacities, we might understand it as a transformation in the “knowledge environment”: an environment in which it has become easy to know something, but harder to truly understand it in depth.