Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  These Internet versions of journals and abstracts have one disadvantage at present: My university can afford only a limited window for the search. I can use the SCI only back ten years; moreover, most e-journals have not yet converted their older volumes to online format (nor can my university often afford to pay for access to these older print journals).

  So the Internet causes scientific knowledge to become obsolete faster than was the case with the older print media. A scientist trained in the print media tradition is aware that there is knowledge stored in the print journals, but I wonder if the new generation of scientists, who grew up with the Internet, is aware of this. Print journals were forever. They may have merely gathered dust for decades, but they could still be read by later generations. I can no longer read my own articles stored on the floppy disks of the 1980s, because computer technology has changed too much. Will information stored on the Internet become unreadable to later generations because of data storage changes—and will the knowledge thus be lost?

  At the moment, the data are accessible. More important, raw experimental data are becoming available to theorists, like myself, via the Internet. It is well known from the history of science that experimentalists quite often do not appreciate the full significance of their own observations. “A new phenomenon is first seen by someone who did not discover it” is one way of expressing this fact. Now that the Internet allows the experimenter to post her data, we theorists can individually analyze them.

  Let me give an example from my own work. Standard quantum mechanics asserts that an interference pattern of electrons passing through a double slit must have a certain distribution as the number of electrons approaches infinity. However, this same standard quantum mechanics does not give an exact description of the rate at which the final distribution will be approached. Many-worlds quantum mechanics, in contrast, gives us a precise formula for this rate of approach, since according to the many-worlds interpretation, physical reality is not probabilistic at all but more deterministic than the universe of classical mechanics. (According to many-worlds quantum mechanics, the wave function measures the density of worlds in the multiverse, rather than a probability.)

  Experimenters—indeed, undergraduate students in physics—have observed the approach to the final distribution, but they have never tried to compare their observations with any rate-of-approach formula, since, according to standard quantum mechanics, there is no rate-of-approach formula. Using the Internet, I was able to find raw data on electron interference, which I used to test the many-worlds formula. Most theorists can tell a similar story.

  But I sometimes wonder if later generations of theorists will be able to tell such a story. Discoveries can be made by analyzing raw data posted online today, but will this always be true? The great physicist Richard Feynman often claimed that “there will be no more great physicists.” Feynman believed that the great physicists were those who looked at reality from a point of view different from that of other scientists. He argued, in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, that all of his own achievements were due not to an IQ higher than other physicists’ but to his having a “different bag of tricks.” Feynman thought future generations of physicists would all have the same bag of tricks and consequently would be unable to move beyond the consensus view. Everyone would think the same way.

  The Internet is currently the great leveler: It allows everyone access to exactly the same information. Will this ultimately destroy diversity of thought? Or will the tendency of people to form isolated groups on the Internet preserve that all-important diversity so that although all scientists have equal access in principle, there are still those who will look at the raw data in a different way from the consensus?

  We Have Become Hunter-Gatherers of Images and Information

  Lee Smolin

  Physicist, Perimeter Institute; author, The Trouble with Physics

  The Internet hasn’t, so far, changed how we think. But it has radically altered the contexts in which we think and work.

  The Internet offers a vast realm for distraction, but then so does reading and television. The Internet is an improvement on television in the same way that Jane Jacobs’s bustling neighborhood sidewalk is an improvement on the dullness of suburbia. The Internet requires an active engagement, and as a result it is full of surprises. You don’t watch the Internet; you search and link. What is important for thought about the Internet is not the content, it is the new activity of being a searcher, with the world’s store of knowledge and images at your fingertips.

  The miracle of the browser is that it can show you any image or text from that storehouse. We used to cultivate thought; now we have become hunter-gatherers of images and information. This speeds things up a lot, but it doesn’t replace the hard work in the laboratory or notebook that prepares the mind for a flash of insight. Nonetheless, it changes the social situation of that mind. Scholars used to be more tied to the past, through texts in libraries, than to their contemporaries. The Internet reverses that, by making each of our minds a node in a continually evolving network of other minds.

  The Internet is also itself a metaphor for the emerging paradigm of thought in which systems are conceived as networks of relationships. To the extent that a Web page can be defined only by what links to it and what it links to, it is analogous to one of Leibniz’s monads. But Web pages have content and so are not purely relational. Imagine a virtual world abstracted from the Internet by deleting the content so that all that remained was the links. This is an image of the universe according to relational theories of space and time; it is also an image of the neural network in the brain. The content corresponds to what is missing in those models; it corresponds to what physicists and computer scientists have yet to understand about the difference between a mathematical model and an animated world or conscious mind.

  Perhaps when the Internet has been soldered into our glasses or teeth, with the screen replaced by a laser making images directly on our retinas, there will be deeper changes. But even in its present form, the Internet has transformed how we scientists work.

  The Internet flattens communities of thought. Blogs, e-mail, and Internet databases put everyone in the community on the same footing. There is a premium on articulateness. You don’t need a secretary to maintain a large and varied correspondence.

  Since 1992, research papers in physics have been posted on an Internet archive, arXiv.org, which has a daily distribution of just-posted papers and complete search and cross-reference capabilities. It is moderated rather then refereed, and the refereed journals now play no role in spreading information. This gives a feeling of engagement and responsibility: Once you are a registered member of the community, you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to publish your scientific results.

  The Internet delocalizes your community. You participate from wherever you are. You don’t need to travel to listen to or give talks and there is less reason to go into the office. A disinclination to travel is no reason not to stay by current reading the latest papers and blog postings.

  It used to be that physics preprints were distributed by bulk mail among major research institutes, and there was thus a big advantage to being at a major university in the United States; everyone else was working with the handicap of being weeks to months behind. The increasing numbers and influence of scientists working in Asia and Latin America and the dominance of European science in some fields is a consequence of the Internet.

  The Internet synchronizes the thinking of global scientific communities. Everyone gets the news about the new papers at the same time. Gossip spreads just as fast, on blogs. Announcements of new experimental results are videocast through the Internet as they happen.

  The Internet also broadens communities of thought. Obscure thinkers to whom you had to be introduced and who published highly original work sporadically and in hard-to-find places now have Web pages and post their papers alongside everyone else’s. And it creates communities of diverse thinkers
who otherwise would not have met, like the community we celebrate every year at this time when we answer the Edge annual question.

  The Human Texture of Information

  Jon Kleinberg

  Professor of computer science, Cornell University; coauthor (with David Easley), Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World

  When Rio de Janeiro was announced as the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics, I was on the phone with colleagues, talking about ideas for how to track breaking news on the Internet. Curious to see how reactions to the announcement were playing out, we went onto the Web to take a look, pushing our way like tourists into the midst of a celebration that was already well under way. The sense that we were surrounded by crowds was not entirely in our imaginations: More than a thousand tweets per minute about Rio were appearing on Twitter, Wikipedians were posting continuous updates to the “2016 Summer Olympics” page, and political blogs were filled with active conversations about the lobbying of world leaders on behalf of different cities.

  This is the shape that current events take online, and there is something more going on here than simple volume. Until recently, information about an event such as this would have been disseminated according to a top-down structure, consisting of an editorially assembled sampling of summaries of the official announcement, reports of selected reactions, and stories of crowds gathering at the scene. But now the information emerges from the bottom up, converging in tiny pieces from all directions. The crowd itself speaks, in a million distinct voices—a deluge of different perspectives.

  The Web hasn’t always looked this way. When I first used an Internet search engine in the early 1990s, I imagined myself dipping into a vast, universal library—a museum vault filled with accumulated knowledge. The fact that I shared this museum vault with other visitors was something I knew but could not directly perceive; we had the tools to engage with the information but not with one another, and so we all passed invisibly by one another.

  When I go online today, all those rooms and hallways are teeming and I can see it. What strikes me is the human texture of the information—the visible conversations, the spikes and bursts of text, the controlled graffiti of tagging and commenting. I’ve come to appreciate the way the event and the crowd live in symbiosis, each dependent on the other—the people all talking at once about the event, but the event fully comprehensible only as the sum total of the human reaction to it. The construction feels literary in its complexity— a scene described by an omniscient narrator, jumping between different points of view, except that here all these voices belong to real, living beings and there’s no master narrative coordinating them. The cacophony might make sense or it might not.

  But the complexity does not arise just from all the human voices—it is accentuated by the fact that the online world is one where human beings and computational creations commingle. You bump into these computational artifacts like strange characters in a Carrollian Wonderland. There is the giant creature who has memorized everything ever written and will repeat excerpts back to you (mainly out of context) in response to your questions. There are the diaphanous forms, barely visible at the right-hand edge of your field of vision, who listen mutely as you cancel meetings and talk about staying home in bed and then mysteriously begin slipping you ads for cough medicine and pain relievers. And even more exotic characters are on the way; a whole industry works tirelessly to develop them.

  The ads for cough medicine are important, and not just because they’re part of what pays for the whole operation. They should continually remind you that you’re part of the giant crowd as well—that everything you do is feeding into a global conversation that is not only visible but recorded. I try to reflect on what behavioral targeting algorithms must think of me—what the mosaic of my actions must look like when everything is taken into account, and which pieces of that mosaic would have been better left off the table.

  The complexity of the online world means that when I use the Internet today, even for the most mundane of purposes, I find myself drawing on skills I first learned in doing research: evaluating many different observations and interpretations of the same events; asking how people’s underlying perspectives, tools, and ways of behaving have shaped their interpretations; and reflecting on my own decisions as part of this process. Think about the cognitive demands this activity involves. Once the domain of scholarship, it is now something the Internet requires from us on a daily basis. It suggests that in addition to “computer literacy”—an old pursuit wherein we teach novices how to use computing technology in a purely operational sense—we need to be conveying the much more complex skill of “information literacy” to the very young: how to reason about the swirl of perspectives you find when you consume information online, how to understand and harness the computational forces that shape this information, how to reason about the subtle consequences of your own actions on the Internet.

  Finally, the Internet has changed how I think professionally, as a computer scientist. In the thirteen years since I finished graduate school, the Internet has steadily and incontrovertibly advanced the argument that computer science is not just about technology but about human beings as well—about the power of human beings to collectively create knowledge and engage in self-expression on a global scale. This has been a thrilling development, and one that points to a new phase in our understanding of what people and technology can accomplish together, and about the world we’ve grown to jointly inhabit.

  Not at All

  Steven Pinker

  Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; author, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

  As someone who believes both in human nature and in timeless standards of logic and evidence, I’m skeptical of the common claim that the Internet is changing the way we think. Electronic media aren’t going to revamp the brain’s mechanisms of information processing, nor will they supersede modus ponens or Bayes’s theorem. Claims that the Internet is changing human thought are propelled by a number of forces: the pressure on pundits to announce that this or that “changes everything”; a superficial conception of what “thinking” is that conflates content with process; the neophobic mindset that “if young people do something that I don’t do, the culture is declining.” But I don’t think the claims stand up to scrutiny.

  Has a generation of texters, surfers, and Twitterers evolved the enviable ability to process multiple streams of novel information in parallel? Most cognitive psychologists doubt it, and recent studies by Clifford Nass of Stanford University’s Communication Department confirm their skepticism. So-called multitaskers are like Woody Allen after he took a speed-reading course and devoured War and Peace in an evening. His summary: “It was about some Russians.”

  Also widely rumored are the students who cannot write a paper without instant-message abbreviations, emoticons, and dubious Web citations. But students indulge in such laziness only to the extent that their teachers let them get away with it. I have never seen a paper of this kind, and a survey of student papers by Stanford English professor Andrea Lunsford shows that they are mostly figments of the pundits’ imaginations.

  The way that intellectual standards constrain intellectual products is nowhere more evident than in science. Scientists are voracious users of the Internet and other computer-based technologies that are supposedly making us stupid, such as PowerPoint, electronic publishing, and e-mail. Yet it would be ludicrous to suggest that scientists think differently than they did a decade ago or that the progress of science has slowed.

  The most interesting trend in the development of the Internet is not how it is changing people’s ways of thinking but how it is adapting to the way people think. The leap in Internet usage that accompanied the appearance of the World Wide Web more than a decade ago came from its user interface, the graphical browser, which worked around the serial, line-based processing of the actual computer hardware to simulate a familiar vi
sual world of windows, icons, and buttons. The changes we are seeing more recently include even more natural interfaces (speech, language, manual manipulation), better emulation of human expertise (as in movie, book, or music recommendations, and more intelligent search), and the application of Web technologies to social and emotional purposes (such as social networking, and sharing of pictures, music, and video) rather than just the traditional nerdy ones.

  To be sure, many aspects of the life of the mind have been affected by the Internet. Our physical folders, mailboxes, bookshelves, spreadsheets, documents, media players, and so on have been replaced by software equivalents, which has altered our time budgets in countless ways. But to call it an alteration of “how we think” is, I think, an exaggeration.

  This Is Your Brain on Internet

  Terrence Sejnowski

  Computational neuroscientist, Salk Institute; coauthor (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain

  What is the impact of spending hours each day in front of a monitor, surfing the Internet and playing games? Brains are highly adaptable, and experiences have long-term effects on its structure and function. You are aware of some of the changes and call it your memory, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are not aware of more subtle changes, which nonetheless can affect your perception and behavior. These changes occur at all levels of your brain, from the earliest perceptual levels to the highest cognitive levels.

  Priming is a dramatic example of unconscious learning, in which a brief exposure to an image or a word can affect how you respond to the same image or word, even in degraded forms, many months later. In one experiment, subjects briefly viewed the outlines of animals and other familiar objects, and seventeen years later they could identify the animals and objects, above chance levels, from versions in which half the outlines had been erased. Some of these subjects did not even remember participating in the original experiment. With conceptual priming, an object like a table can prime the response to a chair. Interestingly, priming decreases reaction times and is accompanied by a decrease in brain activity—the brain becomes faster and more efficient.