Is the Internet making us dumb?
Published Tuesday October 14th, 2008
It's hard to deny that the Internet has a lot to offer. It provides an endless stream of information and communication, some of it useful, some of it less so, but much of it entertaining. To not have the Internet today would be like the time in Grade 4 when a girl in my class told me there was no television in her home. I stared at her like she was an alien.
I thought about that girl a few years ago during a period when I decided to boycott television. I remembered having asked her with genuine perplexity, "What do you do at night?-I read," she answered. That moment somehow stuck with me for over 20 years, like good advice we sometimes prefer to ignore at the time. I thought it ridiculous back then, but in later years I grew to admire the lifestyle choice of her parents.
So what about the Internet today? Will I feel the same way about it as I have about television? I'm beginning to think so already. The endless amount of information available on the Internet seems to trivialize the drama behind that information.
Nicholas Carr wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that the Internet is making us incapable of holding a thought for any significant length of time, thereby stealing the meaning and emotion from the world we read about. As a result, our emotional thoughts are reduced to immediate black and white calculations of yes or no, boring or interesting, significant or insignificant. As Carr states, it's hard to finish a page of a book today without feeling a compulsive need to check e-mail again.
This bombardment of information impacts the way we read and absorb. It steals from the depth of any single storyline.
Thanks to e-mail, text messaging and micro news sources, we now have the attention spans of goldfish.
A global atrocity such as a suicide bomb, for example, is often forgotten as quickly as the news of the event is absorbed. Such events happened frequently in the world before the Internet; we simply didn't have the immediate resources to learn about more than a couple such incidents at a time. Consequently, we retained the information we did read.
While it is exceptional in today's environment to be able to learn about all world incidents with a few clicks of a mouse button, perhaps it was more beneficial when we were able to consider only a couple of them at a time, deeply. For real clarity in any situation it is important to know the story beneath the headline.
With so much information available, how can we focus on anything of significance beyond our own personal and immediate livelihood? We look for disposable news now. News to momentarily raise an eyebrow at or to give us a chuckle. Generally speaking, there is no competition between a link to another complicated genocide story versus a link about Britney Spears shaving her head. Britney is the candy bar to the news' asparagus.
On a positive note for many nations, the chance of revolutions in the future will likely be minimal because people can't stick to one thought long enough to get sufficiently angry. If the Internet was around before terms such as "civil liberties" and "political correctness" became popularized, many movements may have died in their tracks.
It isn't that we don't care about things anymore, it's just that we can't focus long enough to care about things that require sustained brain power.
As Bill Gross of PIMCO, a highly respected global investment management firm wrote, "We care as much as we always have - we just care about the wrong things: entertainment, as opposed to informed choices; trivia v. hardcore ideological debate."
It seems undeniable that the evolution of technological communication is changing the way we live and think. What needs to be seriously considered is whether it is for the better or the worse. Will humanity function at a higher level with quick access to information and brains that trade emotional connection for rapid decision making? Or, do we need to embrace deep thinking with regard to news of the world and the lives we live? If it is the latter, how can we embrace our deep-thinking abilities without stifling social and technological advancement?
These are questions we should be considering before riding the rapids of technological advancement without knowing if they lead over a 80-foot waterfall.
If your attention span has held and you are still reading this, then perhaps you have some answers.
John Millikin is a recent master's graduate in Political Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin. He can be reached by e-mail at j.millikin@shaw.ca.
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I do not agree with you.
Anyone who reads a newspaper everyday will tell you they have a 'strategy' so that they can get through it in a reasonable amount of time. The most common would be that all the information you need to know is in the first few paragraphs of the article.
With the larger amount of info available on the internet, we have developed strategies to get though it. We no longer have the patience to read through a lengthy explanation when a few lines will do (which I will suggest is the case with your article).
The internet has given us the ability, on the individual level, to decide what we want to know about. Before the internet, we were told what we should want to know about. The internet has made 'experts' out of the average man. How many of us don't want to run to the internet to solve a debate we are having with a friend?
I believe that the only thing the internet has done is cut out those who would like to filter the information to us.