Is the Internet making us dumber, a nation of ignoramuses, eventual patsies for the rise of our computer overlords? Are we outsourcing our brain functions to the machines that live on our desks, and is this outsourcing not even bothering us. That's the thesis of Robert Carr's widely read article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", anyway. According to Carr, his constant Internet use is chipping away at his "concentration and contemplation." Carr suspects (with plenty of evidence) that we as humanity are actually being reprogrammed by the Internet, programmed away from the lengthy books that we’ve contented ourselves with for the past few millennia. At the end of his essay, Carr arrives at the source of his discomfort with Google's attempt at creating an "artificial intelligence":
It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
Therefore, Google is sapping us of our ingrained contemplation and reasoning power and replacing
According to Peter Suderman at the American Scene, however, Google may be doing the opposite: it may be making us smart The Internet may indeed be teaching us to think like it does - but is that necessarily a bad thing? To quote:
Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.
So instead of making us stupider, the internet is making us smarter in a different way, changing us from encyclopedias to comprehensive indexes. Therefore, we may simply need to change our definition of what an intelligent person is. Instead of putting up a smart person as someone who can summon up the kings of Poland back 400 years or the subspecies of lemur or whatever, we might have to start being impressed by the person who can find the salient information the fastest, a society where brilliant Google-fu will become more important then total recall. Concentration and contemplation may start to lose their import, as uncomfortable as that sounds to us now. Deep reading and contemplation may begin to lose out to wider (and shallower) skimming. But odds are good we will know more stuff on the whole.
People who have an ability to both find the stuff and aggregate it will, then, be at a serious advantage in the future. Fast readers and thinkers used to have a leg up in the past, but I think they’ll have an even stronger foothold now – after all, the most successful bloggers spend their entire working day scouring the web for info, contemplating it,and putting up real time analysis and opinion. As Sunderman points out, making connections between material and adding to the universal index and cataloguing the world’s information will become of imperative importance – simply absorbing a whole lot of information will no longer be “enough”. Old school rumination may lose out to online consensus building, collection, and contextualizing – but is that necessarily going to ruin us all? We used to “become” books and think like they did: now we are quite literally “becoming” the Internet.
Newsweek’s new model, interestingly enough,is a sort of capitulation to the new speed of journalism – they’ve decided to focus more on in-depth analysis and less on reporting simply what happened. Let’s see how their model works for the future of print journalism. Will people be willing to divide their time between shallow and instant information and deep analysis? Or will people simply pick one?
I also take umbrage with Carr’s belief that the internet somehow stifles ambiguity and contemplation. I’d argue the opposite. We’re now able to access pretty much any information we might possibly want at any time. I don’t know about you, but I think that that sort of access has increased the quality of my contemplation. Further, if we’re talking ambiguity and fuzziness, I think being allowed access to pretty much every possible side and aspect of an argument actually increases our ability to see the all-important grey area. (Of course, this precludes some convincing arguments that people simply use the Internet to read about stuff they already agree with.)
Still, there’s gotta be some drawbacks to trusting all our knowledge to the internet. There’s always the chance that the internet could be destroyed or temporarily knocked out, bringing some future generations internet-centralized knowledge crashing down to earth with it. I do not think the model of being Internet or index smart only is in any way sustainable as the world is now: the internet’s penetration into most of the world is still incomplete or vague, and even my high-speed connection goes down inexplicably now and again. We’ll need to be pretty much certain the internet can 1. reach us all and 2. is extremely reliable, like turning the light on, before we can rely upon it for most of our knowledge and chuck a lot of the hard memorization our educational system currently relies upon.
I don’t think it is possible to retard the flow of thinking-via-internet vs. thinking via-books. My generation is already pretty finely tuned to getting our information via internet indexes, and future generations will only be more so. We’re simply going to have to figure out how we can most effectively blend stationary information and mobile/internet based information. And I don’t think we’ll have to chuck out ambiguity and contemplation in the pursuit of knowing more and knowing better.
No comments:
Post a Comment