Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  The new generation growing up immersed in the digital complex may be developing thinking processes more suitable for the new paradigm, for better or worse. But perhaps human thinking is not as amenable to modification by external factors as one might expect. And the Internet may be more retro than it seems. The mass media of the twentieth century were truly novel, because the analog-based technology turned folks from home entertainers and creators (gathering around the piano and singing and composing songs and the like) to passive consumers of a few major outlets (sitting around the telly and fighting over the remote). People are using hyperfast digital technology to return to self-creativity and entertainment. How all this is affecting young psyches is a matter for sociobehavioral and neuropsychological research to sort out.

  But how humans old and young are affected may not matter all that much. In the immediacy of this early-twenty-first-century moment, the Internet revolution may look more radical than it actually is. It could merely be an introduction to the real revolution. The human domination of digital communications will be a historically transitory event if and when high-level-thinking cyberminds start utilizing the system. The ability of superintelligences to share and mull over information will dwarf what mere humans can manage. Exactly how will the interconnected überminds think? Hell if I know.

  What I Notice

  Brian Eno

  Artist; composer; recording producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; recording artist

  I notice that some radical social experiments that would have seemed utopian to even the most idealistic anarchist fifty years ago are now working smoothly and without much fuss. Among these are open-source development, shareware and freeware, Wikipedia, MoveOn, and UK Citizens Online Democracy.

  I notice that the Net didn’t free the world in quite the way we expected. Repressive regimes can shut it down, and liberal ones can use it as a propaganda tool. On the upside, I notice that the variable trustworthiness of the Net has made people more skeptical about the information they get from all other media.

  I notice that I now digest my knowledge as a patchwork drawn from a wider range of sources than I used to. I notice, too, that I am less inclined to look for joined-up, finished narratives and more inclined to make my own collage from what I can find. I notice that I read books more cursorily, scanning them in the same way that I scan the Net—“bookmarking” them.

  I notice that the turn-of-the-century dream of bioethicist Darryl Macer to make a map of all the world’s concepts is coming true autonomously—in the form of the Net.

  I notice that I correspond with more people but at less depth. I notice that it is possible to have intimate relationships that exist only on the Net and have little or no physical component. I notice that it is even possible to engage in complex social projects, such as making music, without ever meeting your collaborators. I am unconvinced of the value of these.

  I notice that the idea of “community” has changed: Whereas that term once connoted some sort of physical and geographical connectedness between people, now it can mean “the exercise of any shared interest.” I notice that I now belong to hundreds of communities—the community of people interested in active democracy, the community of people interested in synthesizers, in climate change, in Tommy Cooper jokes, in copyright law, in a cappella singing, in loudspeakers, in pragmatist philosophy, in evolution theory, and so on.

  I notice that the desire for community is sufficiently strong for millions of people to belong to entirely fictional communities, such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. I worry that this may be at the expense of First Life.

  I notice that more of my time is spent in words and language— because that is the currency of the Net—than it was before. My notebooks take longer to fill. I notice that I mourn the passing of the fax machine, a more personal communication tool than e-mail because it allowed the use of drawing and handwriting. I notice that my mind has reset to being primarily linguistic rather than, for example, visual.

  I notice that the idea of “expert” has changed. An expert used to be “somebody with access to special information.” Now, since so much information is equally available to everyone, the idea of “expert” becomes “somebody with a better way of interpreting.” Judgment has replaced access.

  I notice that I have become a slave to connectedness—that I check my e-mail several times a day, that I worry about the heap of unsolicited and unanswered mail in my inbox. I notice that I find it hard to get a whole morning of uninterrupted thinking. I notice that I am expected to answer e-mails immediately, and that it is difficult not to. I notice that as a result I am more impulsive.

  I notice that I more often give money in response to appeals made on the Net. I notice that memes can now spread like virulent infections through the vector of the Net—and that this isn’t always good. I notice that I sometimes sign petitions about things I don’t really understand, because it’s easy. I assume that this kind of irresponsibility is widespread.

  I notice that everything the Net displaces reappears somewhere else in a modified form. For example, musicians used to tour to promote their records, but since records stopped making much money due to illegal downloads, they now make records to promote their tours. Bookstores with staff who know about books, and record stores with staff who know about music, are becoming more common.

  I notice that as the Net provides free or cheap versions of things, the “authentic experience”—the singular experience enjoyed without mediation—becomes more valuable. I notice that more attention is given by creators to the aspects of their work that can’t be duplicated. The “authentic” has replaced the reproducible.

  I notice that hardly any of us have thought about the chaos that would ensue if the Net collapsed.

  I notice that my daily life has been changed more by my mobile phone than by the Internet.

  It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Can Find Out

  Marissa Mayer

  Vice president, Search Products and User Experience, Google

  It’s not what you know, it’s what you can find out. The Internet has put resourcefulness and critical thinking at the forefront and relegated memorization of rote facts to mental exercise or enjoyment. Because of the abundance of information and this new emphasis on resourcefulness, the Internet creates a sense that anything is knowable or findable—as long as you can construct the right search, find the right tool, or connect to the right people. The Internet enables better decision making and a more efficient use of time.

  Simultaneously, it also leads to a sense of frustration when the information doesn’t exist online. (What do you mean, the store hours aren’t anywhere? Why can’t I see a particular page of this book? And if not verbatim, has no one quoted this even in part? What do you mean that page isn’t available?)

  The Internet can facilitate an incredible persistence and availability of information, but given the Internet’s adolescence, not all the information is there yet. I find that in some ways my mind has adopted this new way of the thinking—that is, relying on information’s existence and availability—so completely that it’s almost impossible to conclude that the information isn’t findable because it simply isn’t online.

  The Web has also enabled amazing dynamic visualizations, whereby an ideal presentation of information is constructed—a table of comparisons, or a data-enhanced map, for example. These visualizations—news from around the world displayed on a globe, say, or a sortable table of airfares—can greatly enhance our comprehension of the world and our sense of opportunity. We can grasp in an instant what would have taken months to create just a few short years ago. Yet the Internet’s lack of structure means that these types of visualization can’t be constructed for all data. To achieve true automated general understanding and visualization, we will need much better machine learning, entity extraction, and semantics capable of operating at vast scales.

  On that note—and regarding future Internet innovation—the important
question may be not how the Internet is changing the way we think but how the Internet is teaching itself to think.

  When I’m on the Net, I Start to Think

  Ai Weiwei

  Artist; curator; architectural designer, Beijing National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest); cultural and social commentator; activist

  Nowadays I mostly think only on the Internet. My thinking is divided into on the Net and off the Net. If I’m not on the Net, I don’t think that much; when I’m on the Net, I start to think. In this way, my thinking becomes part of something else.

  The Internet Has Become Boring

  Andrian Kreye

  Editor, The Feuilleton (arts and essays) of the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

  I think faster now. The Internet has somewhat freed me of some of the twentieth century’s burdens: the burden of commuting, the burden of coordinating communication, the burden of traditional literacy. I don’t think the Internet would be of much use if I hadn’t carried those burdens to excess all through my life. If continually speeding up thinking constitutes changing the way I think, though, the Internet has done a marvelous job.

  I wasn’t an early adopter, but the process of adaptation started early. I didn’t yet understand what would come upon us when, one afternoon in 1989 at MIT’s Media Lab, Marvin Minsky told me that the most important trait of a computer would be not its power but what it would be connected to. A couple of years later, I stumbled upon the cyberpunk scene in San Francisco. People were popping “smart” drugs (which didn’t do anything), Timothy Leary declared virtual reality the next psychedelic (which never panned out), Todd Rundgren warned of a coming overabundance of creative work without a parallel rise in great ideas (which is now reflected in laments about the rise of the amateur). It was still the old underground, running the new emerging culture. This new culture was driven by thought rather than art, though. That’s also where I met Cliff Figallo, who ran a virtual community called the WELL. He introduced me to John Perry Barlow, who had just established the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The name said it all: There was a new frontier.

  It would still take me a few more years to grasp this. One stifling evening in a rented apartment in downtown Dakar, my photographer and I disassembled a phone line and a modem to circumvent incompatible jacks and get our laptop to dial up some node in Paris. It probably saved us a good week of research in the field. Now my thinking started to take on the speed I had sensed in Boston and San Francisco. Continually freeing me of the aforementioned burdens, it has allowed me to focus even more on the tasks expected of me as a journalist—finding context, meaning, and a way to communicate complex topics as simply as possible.

  An important development—one that has allowed this new freedom—is that possibly the biggest thing that’s happened to the Internet over the past few years is that it’s become boring. Gone are the adventurous days of using a pocketknife to log on to Paris from Africa. Even in remote places on this planet, logging on to the Net means merely turning on your machine. This paradigm reigns all through the Web. Twitter is one of the simplest Internet applications ever developed. Still, it has sped up my thinking in ever more ways. Facebook in itself is dull, but it has created new networks not possible before. Integrating all media into a blog has become so easy that grammar school kids can do it, so that the free-form forum has become a great place to test out new possibilities. I don’t think about the Internet anymore. I just use it.

  All this, however, might not constitute a change in thinking. I haven’t changed my mind or my convictions because of the Internet. I haven’t had any epiphanies while sitting in front of a screen. The Internet, so far, has given me no memorable experiences, although it may have helped usher some along. People, places, and experiences are what change the way I think.

  The Dumb Butler

  Joshua Greene

  Cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher, Harvard University

  Have you ever read a great book published before the mid-1990s and thought, “My goodness! These ideas are so primitive! So . . . pre- Internet!”? Me neither. The Internet hasn’t changed the way we think any more than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn’t changed what we do with it once it’s made it into our heads. This is because the Internet doesn’t (yet) know how to think. We still have to do it for ourselves, and we do it the old-fashioned way.

  One of the Internet’s early disappointments was the now defunct Website Ask Jeeves. (It was succeeded by Ask.com, which dropped Jeeves in 2006.) Jeeves appeared as a highly competent infobutler, who could understand and answer questions posed in natural language (“How was the East Asian economy affected by the Latin American debt crisis?” “Why do fools fall in love?”). Anyone who spent more than a few minutes querying Jeeves quickly learned that Jeeves himself didn’t understand squat. Jeeves was just a search engine like the rest, mindlessly matching the words contained in your question to words found on the Internet. The best Jeeves could do with your profound question—the best any search engine can do today—is direct you to the thoughts of another human being who has already attempted to answer a question related to yours. This is not to say that cultural artifacts can’t change the way we think.

  The political philosopher Jim Flynn has documented substantial gains in IQ in the twentieth century (the Flynn effect), which he attributes to our enhanced capacity for abstract thought, which he in turn attributes to the cognitive demands of the modern marketplace. Why hasn’t the Internet had a comparable effect? The answer, I think, is that the roles of master and servant are reversed. We place demands on the Internet, but the Internet hasn’t placed any fundamentally new demands on us. In this sense, the Internet really is like a butler. It gives us the things we want faster and with less effort, but it doesn’t give us anything we couldn’t otherwise get for ourselves, and it doesn’t require us to do anything more than give comprehensible orders.

  Someday we’ll have a nuts-and-bolts understanding of complex abstract thought, which will enable us to build machines that can do it for us and perhaps do it better than we do—and perhaps teach us a thing or two about it. But until then, the Internet will continue to be nothing more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb, butler.

  Finding Stuff Remains a Challenge

  Philip Campbell

  Editor-in-chief, Nature

  For better or worse, the Internet is changing when I think— nighttime ideas can be instantly acted on. But much more important, the Internet has immeasurably supported my breadth of consideration and enhanced my speed of access to relevant stuff. Frustrations arise, above all, where these are constrained—and there’s a rub.

  We are in sight of technologies that can truly supersede paper, retaining the portability, convenience, and format variety of that medium. Instant payment for added-value content will become easier and, indeed, will be taken for granted in many contexts.

  But finding the stuff will remain a challenge. Brands, both publishers’ and others’, if deployed in a user-friendly way, will by their nature assist those seeking particular types of content. But content within established brands is far from an adequate representation of what matters, and that’s why robust and inclusive indexing systems are so important.

  I remain uneasy that biologists worldwide are so dependent on a literature-indexing system wholly funded by U.S. taxpayers: PubMed. Nevertheless, it’s extraordinarily valuable and works in the interests of researchers—and also of publishers, by making their work accessible without undermining their business models.

  I emphasize that last point with good reason. One of the worst (i.e., self-defeatingly shortsighted) acts of “my” industry occurred in the early 2000s. Congress, lobbied by publishers and seemingly ignorant of the proven virtues of PubMed, rejected support for an equivalent search infrastructure, PubSCIENCE, established by the U.S. Department of Energy as an index for physical sciences a
nd energy research. The lobbyists argued, wrongheadedly, that it competed with private-sector databases. It was abandoned in 2002. Publishers have lost opportunities as a result, as has everyone else. Energy research, after all, has never been more urgent nor more in the United States’ and the world’s interest.

  PubMed imposes overly conservative restrictions on what it will index, but it is a beacon nevertheless. Anyone in the natural sciences who, like me, has taken an active interest in the social sciences knows how hopelessly unfindable by comparison is that literature, distributed as it is among books, reports, and unindexed journals. Google Scholar is in some ways valuable, providing access also to some “gray” literatures, but its algorithms are a law unto themselves and, in my experience, miss some of the literature. And so often the books and reports are themselves difficult to obtain.

  There are foundations and other funders potentially more enlightened than Congress when it comes to supporting literature digitization and indexing. And universities are developing online repositories of their outputs, though with limited success.

  Whatever works! Those wishing to promote the visibility and, dare one say, usefulness of their own work and of their disciplines should hotly pursue online availability of all types of substantive texts and, crucially, inclusive indexing.

  Attention, Crap Detection, and Network Awareness

  Howard Rheingold

  Communications expert; author, Smart Mobs