Does technology make us smarter or dumber? On a person to person basis that is a silly question. Does a modern nail gun make one a better carpenter than one with a hammer? Sure the nail gun makes the work easier and go by faster, but any building built without common knowledge of architecture and carpentry will probably be severely flawed. The point being that technologies are the ideas and tools we use to accomplish something, and that our intelligence is measured not only by the ideas and tools we have created in the past, but also by how well we utilize or improve upon them in the present.

The most popular argument I have personally seen against technology's influence is the argument against 'txt spk'. Also known as SMS language, txt spk came about through necessity with the lack of QWERTY keyboards on primitive phones and the limited number of character a text message can contain. As such, txt spk takes advantage of pictograms (<3 for love), numbers (2 for to, too, or two), and the process of removing the vowels from a word (dctnry for dictionary). Because of this txt spk has garnered a lot of criticism for being sloppy, irritating, and lazy, and for having a negative impact on the English language. However, several scholarly studies, summarized in linguist David Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, rescind this theory. The chief points being that one needs to know how to spell a word properly before they can abbreviate it, and that texting improves literacy simply by engaging users in language.

To point out how technology has made us smarter, simply look at our modern public education system compared to how it was pre-industrial revolution. Our school buses allow for more than 50 million children in the United States to go to school 5 days a week. The hundreds of years of teaching practices and philosophies we have built upon and improved have allowed for country-wide standardized education, resulting in the highest levels of literacy humanity has ever enjoyed and human history is full of proof that a more literate population results in more human progress.