[Xerxes]

From the Cover Story of The Atlantic:

http://www.theatlant...c/200807/google

Quote

...

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going—so far as I can tell—but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

...

I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

...

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content," we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what's at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available."

Quote

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”


“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Does the internet make society smarter yet less mentally capable?

This post has been edited by Xerxes: 03 August 2008 - 01:56 PM

[techs]

Depends upon your definition of "smarter". I would say that it certainly makes us more knowledgeable. Any given fact is usually little more than a quick search away, and anyone can find it regardless of their background or prior knowledge. That makes knowledge much more commonplace, and at the same time, much less valuable. Pure memorization of facts is an almost useless endeavor at this point, because the Internet is always there to remember them for us. However, just because knowledge is increased, that doesn't mean that intelligence or wisdom is increased as well. Being able to retrieve a fact doesn't mean that you'll be able to properly understand it, or figure out how to apply it in a broader context to actually accomplish something. I don't think the Internet helps so much in that regard. So because of the Internet, we "know" more, but we're probably not any better at applying that knowledge than we'd be without the Internet.

Regarding the shorted attention-span thing, I think it's real, but I don't think the Internet is the only blameable party. TV, radio, cell phones, any anything else that gives people instant, on demand access to information are all equally responsible. When there are so many sources of information that are faster than sitting down and digesting a long article, people use long articles less and less to get information, and as a result, the skills involved in processing longer articles start to diminish from lack of use. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, so long as the faster sources of information are of comparable quality to the slower ones. And also, I think it's an entirely reversible thing. If you choose to not watch the TV, and stay off the Internet, and go back to the older ways of getting information, the associated skills will return.

[Sandman2012]

techsupp0rt, on Aug 3 2008, 01:33 PM, said:

Depends upon your definition of "smarter". I would say that it certainly makes us more knowledgeable. Any given fact is usually little more than a quick search away, and anyone can find it regardless of their background or prior knowledge. That makes knowledge much more commonplace, and at the same time, much less valuable. Pure memorization of facts is an almost useless endeavor at this point, because the Internet is always there to remember them for us. However, just because knowledge is increased, that doesn't mean that intelligence or wisdom is increased as well. Being able to retrieve a fact doesn't mean that you'll be able to properly understand it, or figure out how to apply it in a broader context to actually accomplish something. I don't think the Internet helps so much in that regard. So because of the Internet, we "know" more, but we're probably not any better at applying that knowledge than we'd be without the Internet.

Good point.

I see it as a natural part of progress, the way technology changes those who use it, individually and culturally. As technology is able to more things for us, certain skill sets will become more rare, which is why most people don't know how to use a printing press anymore, and why we don't see more people reciting epic poems from memory down at the tavern. Much of the time the changes improve us. Sometimes they hurt us. In my opinion progress is better than stagnation. We mourn the loss of skill sets and other things that are no longer relevant, and hopefully find the best use of the new stuff that comes along.

And we keep our fingers crossed, because we're human: sometimes we jump first and look later.

[SammytheMc]

techsupp0rt, on Aug 3 2008, 04:33 PM, said:

However, just because knowledge is increased, that doesn't mean that intelligence or wisdom is increased as well. Being able to retrieve a fact doesn't mean that you'll be able to properly understand it, or figure out how to apply it in a broader context to actually accomplish something.

I actually disagree with this. The more facts you are able to retrieve, the more practice you get collating them in your head. While this may not mean a ton on an objective scale, it still usually leads to personal improvement as long as you are getting actual facts and not drowning in opinion (the biggest danger of the internet). A person can practice guitar for a million years and not be as good as Jimmy Page, but I bet that person would be a lot better at guitar than they used to be. Gaining wisdom is not a necessary result of gaining more knowledge, but you need knowledge to gain wisdom, and I figure the more the better.

This post has been edited by SammytheMc: 04 August 2008 - 07:42 AM

[shakey_snake]

Personally, I doubt the internet is actually increasing our "smartness" or "intelligence"; it's just changing the way that we relate ideas. The internet is in all senses becoming a culture of it's own, and just as say Scandinavian culture is no more "smarter" or "sophisticated" or "civilized" or _______ than say Thai culture, the internet is really no more smarter" or "sophisticated" or "civilized" or _______ than non-internet (or pre-internet) culture.

So in that sense, the internet is no more remarkable than really any other methods in which people communicate.

What is really remarkable is the fact that this whole other culture is so accessible. That is to say, it is remarkable how quickly one can switch between internet culture and whatever other cultures you take part in on this earth. Because of this, what's happening is more people are essentially what you could call multi-cultural, since they have experiences in both internet culture and their own culture. When people are claiming that the internet "makes the world smaller", what they are really experiancing isn't so much that the internet is a vehicle to take you to other places, but that the internet is itself the destination, and one that they can easily get to.

This post has been edited by shakey_snake: 04 August 2008 - 12:51 AM

[OM]

[beyondthunderdome] The internet's revolution'ry, no doubts, just as the print'n press was way back in the long long ago. It gives us the knowing, through the wires. It was telling us of all the peoples and all the things, and then we becomes humble once we know'd it.[/beyondthunderdome]

I see the web as just an extension of ourselves. In other words, now we have near infinite memory and we know everything that everyone else knows (or at least we're approaching this), so we're probably going to end up as appendages to some great thing that encompasses us all. The overload in information is probably natural in that we've never needed the faculties to process all the information in the world before. Once this settles down, we'll be able to ponder the deep koans once again and produce Shakespeare 2.0 when that gets old. We'll probably be able to process it in time by changing ourselves biologically with the help of technology. The lines between our minds and something we can create in a lab are being erased now. (example example)

This post has been edited by OM: 04 August 2008 - 01:32 AM

[feroxis]

shakey_snake, on Aug 3 2008, 07:48 PM, said:

The internet is in all senses becoming a culture of it's own, and just as say Scandinavian culture is no more "smarter" or "sophisticated" or "civilized" or _______ than say Thai culture, the internet is really no more smarter" or "sophisticated" or "civilized" or _______ than non-internet (or pre-internet) culture.

I think the internet has fueled this now-common bit of idealism - one with which I tend to disagree. Sometimes, when someone talks up cultural relativism, I imagine them transported into another civilization - one just as smart and sophisticated as their own where it's just peachy that they're about to be sacrificed to pagan gods. "How interesting," they would say as they are being carried to the mouth of the volcano, "and I certainly respect your beliefs, traditions and worldview as being no less civilized and worthy of consideration than my own."

More to the point, I feel that anonymity has bred incivility on the internet. The internet is still a lawless place - it always makes me think of the Wild West except that no one's empowered to be law enforcement. I think the internet will become increasingly intellectual just as it will become increasingly (and vilely) sophomoric. It's growing in all directions, including those segments which abandon anonymity and produce real ideas that can't all be digested in a 30 second bite.

Using the internet is difficult because of the background noise one must filter out. The information is there... but it's difficult to concentrate on, and often difficult to find. The internet is useful but can quickly turn unhealthy, like many prescription drugs. The internet fosters attention deficit as well as obsession. It breeds unhealthy communities which further insulate their members from outside society and physical human contact.

Society is adapting to all of this, and in the end I think it will be all right. We're better off for the network, I think, despite all its flaws.

[hestermofet]

My problem with the Internet is the same problem that feroxis stated. It makes people much more insulated because they surround themselves with like-minded people, and makes shying away from differing viewpoints easier. The echo chamber effect. You see this most with political blogs, but also strikes forums, chat rooms, and newsgroups.

Does it make us smarter and less intelligent? I think that's impossible, because I equate smartness to intelligence (intelligence is a weasel word though, because there are different kinds of intelligences, and you have to clearly define what you mean by "intelligence" when you use that word). What I think it does is make us appear to be more knowledgeable, yet at the same time, does not increase our wisdom. We can appear knowledgeable because the Internet has made information more democratic and accessible.

Excellent topic, by the way. I don't really have anything unique to add to this discussion that hasn't been covered by others, but I replied to the topic anyway to show my appreciation for a good disputus topic.

[aaronsen]

It likely does have an effect on our mental processes. I used to be happy to engage in debate about interesting or controversial topics, but for the last four years or so I've always steered clear of them, figuring that it doesn't make a difference, that debating this topic is a waste of time when I can get a quick entertainment fix instead.

That said, I haven't lost the ability to engage in debate.

[sttaffy]

it depends on how you use it, i think. if you use it as a substitute for your memory, that is, if you cant remember who was in a movie, you look it up, go 'huh' then forget it, then yes, the internet is atrophying your brain.

i tend to agree with sammy on this one: if you absorb, connect, relate and parse this information, then pursue more, ancillary info, then you are exercising your brains.

[ScorLibran]

The internet, like any other communication platform and source of information, will be used based upon the individual interests and talents of each person. But it gives us some new things that we didn't have 30 years ago, such as a place for kids to go and get their feet wet with the likes of politics and technology. In turn, kids get a positive head start in the "real world" at a younger age than they ever could before. The hardest aspects, in my opinion, are (1) that it requires careful monitoring by parents who are often overwhelmed by technology about which so many are clueless, and (2) that it doesn't at all relieve the amount of guidance children need in seeking out reliable information - in fact, MORE guidance is often required now than in the past, as there is so much more information to parse through than you'd find in a typical library, and most of it hasn't received the scrutiny of review, editing and publishing.

And adults and kids alike have to be careful how much creedence they give to something read outside of trusted sources, as there is rarely any meaningful indication who wrote it.

One of the worst things a parent can do is to put a computer into their kid's room to use as they please, outside the parent's supervision. There are many more things in the world that can hurt them now. Not only the obvious threats from child predators, but also things that can hurt them intellectually. The human brain doesn't complete its development until the mid-twenties, and the last things to develop are responsibility and prioritization skills. This means if a kid grasps onto a large amount of data they get from the internet - and that amount can be quite large by the time they're 20 years old - it can seriously impede their ability to find success as an adult. I and many other business leaders are seeing this effect more and more often trying to fill entry-level positions. Such positions that used to be quite easy are now proving a tough road for the first round of the Internet Generation.

It used to be enough for parents to hope that their kids would learn. That's not enough anymore - now they have to make sure their kids learn right.