Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  A Return to the Scarlet-Letter Savanna

  Jesse Bering

  Psychologist; director, Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queens University, Belfast; columnist, Scientific American (“Bering in Mind”); author, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life

  Only 10,000 years ago, our Homo sapiens ancestors were still living in close-knit societies about the size of which today would barely fill a large lecture hall in a state university. What today might be seen as an embarrassing faux pas could have been the end of the line for you back then. At least, it could have been the end of the line for your reproductive success, since an irreversibly spoiled reputation in such a small group could have meant a surefire death for your genes.

  Just imagine the very worst thing you’ve ever done: the most vile, scandalous, and vulgar. Now imagine all the details of this incident tattooed on your forehead. This scenario is much like what our ancestors would have encountered if their impulsive, hedonistic, and self-centered drives weren’t kept in check by their more recently evolved prudent inhibitions. And this was especially the case, of course, under conditions in which others were watching them, perhaps without their realizing it. Our ancestors, if their ancient, selfish drives overpowered them, couldn’t simply pull up stakes and move to a new town. Rather, since they were more or less dependent on those with whom they shared a few hundred square kilometers, cutting off all connections wasn’t a viable option. And hiding their identities behind a mantle of anonymity wasn’t really doable, either, since they couldn’t exactly be a nameless face. The closest our ancestors had to anonymity was the cover of night. Thus in the ancestral past, being good, being moral by short-circuiting our species’ evolved selfish desires, was even more a matter of life and death than it is today. It was a scarlet-letter savanna.

  Yet curiously, for all its technological sophistication and seeming advances, the Internet has heralded something of a return to this scarlet-letter-savanna environment and in many ways has brought our species back to its original social roots.

  After a long historical period during which people may have been able to emigrate to new social groups and start over if they had spoiled their reputations, the present media age more accurately reflects the conditions faced by our ancestors. With newspapers, telephones, cameras, television, and especially the Internet at our disposal, personal details about medical problems, spending activities, criminal and financial history, and divorce records (to name just a few matters potentially costly to our reputations) are not only permanently archived but also can be distributed in microseconds to, literally, millions of other people. The old adage “Wherever you go, there you are” takes on new meaning in light of the evolution of information technology. From background checks to matchmaking services to anonymous Website browsing to piracy and identity theft, from Googling others (and ourselves) to flaming bad professors (e.g., www .ratemyprofessor.com) and stingy customers (e.g., www.bitterwaitress .com), the Internet is simply ancient social psychology meeting new information technology.

  Take Love

  Helen Fisher

  Research professor, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University; author, Why We Love

  For me, the Internet is a return to yesteryear; it simply allows me (and all the rest of us) to think and behave in ways for which we were built long, long ago. Take love. For millions of years, our forebears traveled in little hunting-and-gathering bands. Some twenty-five individuals lived together, day and night; some ten to twelve were children and adolescents. But everyone knew just about everyone else in a neighborhood of several hundred square miles. They got together, too. Annually, in the dry season, bands congregated at the permanent waters that dotted eastern and southern Africa. Here as many as five hundred men, women, and children would mingle, chat, dine, dance, perhaps even worship together. And although a pubescent girl who saw a cute boy at the next campfire might not know him personally, her mother probably knew his aunt, or her older brother had hunted with his cousin. All were part of the same broad social web.

  Moreover, in the ever present gossip circles a young girl could easily collect data on a potential suitor’s hunting skills, even on whether he was amusing, kind, smart. We think it’s natural to court a totally unknown person in a bar or club. But it’s far more natural to know a few basic things about an individual before meeting him or her. Internet dating sites, chat rooms, and social networking sites provide these details, enabling the modern human brain to pursue more comfortably its ancestral mating dance.

  Then there’s the issue of privacy. Some are mystified by the way others, particularly the young, so frivolously reveal their intimate lives on Facebook or Twitter, in e-mails, and via other Internet billboards. This odd human habit has even spilled into our streets and other public places. How many times have you had to listen to people nonchalantly blare out their problems on cell phones while you sat on a train or bus? Yet for millions of years our forebears had almost no privacy. With the Internet, we are returning to this practice of shared community.

  So for me, the Internet has only magnified—on a grand scale—what I already knew about human nature. Sure, with the Net, I more easily and rapidly acquire information than in the old days. I can more easily sustain connections with colleagues, friends, and family. And sometimes I find it easier to express complex or difficult feelings via e-mail than in person or on the phone. But my writing isn’t any better . . . or worse. My perspectives haven’t broadened . . . or narrowed. My values haven’t altered. I have just as much data to organize. My energy level is just the same. My workload has probably increased. And colleagues want what they want from me even faster. My daily habits have changed—moderately.

  But the way I think? I don’t think any harder, faster, longer, or more effectively than I did before I bought my first computer, in 1985. In fact, the rise of the Internet only reminds me of how little any of us have changed since the modern human brain evolved more than 35,000 years ago. We are still the same warlike, peace-loving, curious, gregarious, proud, romantic, opportunistic, and naïve creatures we were before the Internet—indeed, before the automobile, the radio, the Civil War, or the ancient Sumerians. We still have the same brain our forebears had as they stalked woolly mammoths and mastodons; we still chat and warm our hands where they once camped—on land that is now London, Beijing, New York. With the Internet, we just have a much louder megaphone with which to scream who we really are.

  Internet Mating Strategies

  David M. Buss

  Professor of psychology, University of Texas, Austin; coauthor ( with Cindy M. Meston), Why Women Have Sex

  The ancient strategies of human mating are implemented in novel ways on the Internet. Humans evolved in small groups with available mates limited to a few dozen possibilities. The Web provides unprecedented and tantalizing access to thousands, or millions. The stigma of traditional dating services, once the refuge of the lonely and forlorn, has disappeared in the digital world of modern mating.

  The bounty of mating opportunities in today’s computational sphere yields some tangible benefits. It allows people to secure better mating fits—access to that special someone who shares your unique interests in underground rock bands, obscure novelists, or unheard-of foreign movies. It can abbreviate search costs, eliminating the nonstarters without forcing you to slog through the cumbersome dating maze. The Internet affords practice (the stuttering and shy in person can be eloquently bold on the keyboard). Because of the surfeit of opportunity, the Internet may yield good bargains on the mating market, a maximization of one’s mate value, or access to the otherwise unattainable. It allows some to luxuriate in sexual adventures unimaginable in the small-group living of our distant past.

  Humans are loath to settle when better prospects entice. The abundance of mating opportunities sometimes produces paralyzing indecision. A more exciting encounter, a more attractive partner, a true soul mate might be a few clicks away. The World Wide
Web may reduce commitment to a “one and only,” because opportunities for promising others seem so plentiful. It can cloak sexual deception. Are the personal descriptions accurate? Are images Photoshopped? It opens new avenues for exploitation. Sexual predators hone their tactics on the unwary, the innocent, or those open to adventure. At the same time, computer-savvy victims countermand those maneuvers, manipulate marauders, and reduce their vulnerability to predation in a never-ending arms race.

  In most ways, though, the Internet has not altered how we think about mating. Nor has it changed our underlying sexual psychology. Men continue to value physical appearance. Women continue to value ambition, status, and financial prospects. Both sexes continue to trade up when they can and cut losses when they can’t. Sexual economics remain; only the format has changed. Hunter-gatherer market exchanges of sex and meat have been replaced with Internet markets of sugar babies and sugar daddies. The mating and dating sites most successful are those that exploit our ancient mating psychology. Evolved mechanisms of mind now can be played out in the global, semianonymous modern world of interconnectivity. The eternal quest for love, spirituality, or sexual union may evaporate in the clouds of cyberspace. But then again, glory in affairs of the heart has always been fleeting.

  Internet Society

  Robert R. Provine

  Psychologist and neuroscientist, University of Maryland; author, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation

  At the end of my college lectures, students immediately flip open their cell phones, checking for calls and texts. In the cafeteria, I observe students standing in queues, texting, neglecting fellow students two feet away. Late one afternoon, I noticed six students wandering up and down a hallway while using cell phones, somehow avoiding collision, like ships cruising in the night, lost in a fog of conversation—or like creatures from The Night of the Living Dead. A student reported e-mailing on a Saturday night “computer date” without leaving her room. Paradoxically, these students were both socially engaged and socially isolated.

  My first encounter with people who were using unseen phone headsets was startling; they walked through an airline terminal apparently engaging in soliloquies or responding to hallucinated voices. More is involved than the displacement of snail mail by e-mail, a topic of past decades. Face-to-face encounters are being displaced by relations with a remote, disembodied conversant somewhere in cyberspace. These experiences forced a rethinking of my views about communication—technological and biological, ancient and modern—and prompted research projects examining the emotional impact, novelty, and evolution of social media.

  The gold standard for interpersonal communication is face-to-face conversation, in which you can both see and hear your conversant. In several studies, I contrasted this ancestral audiovisual medium with cell phone use, in which you hear but do not see your conversant, and texting, in which you neither see nor hear your conversant.

  The telephone, whether cell or land line, provides a purely auditory medium that transmits two-way vocal information, including the prosodic (affective) component of speech. Although it filters the visual signals of gestures, tears, smiles, and other facial expressions, the purely auditory medium of the telephone is itself socially and emotionally potent, generating smiles and laughter in remote individuals—a point we confirmed by observation of 1,000 solitary people in public places. Unless using a cell phone, isolated people are essentially smileless, laughless, and speechless. (We confirmed the obvious because the obvious is sometimes wrong.) Constant, emotionally rewarding vocal contact with select, distant conversants is a significant contributor to the worldwide commercial success of cell phones. Radio comedy and drama further demonstrate the power of a purely auditory medium, even when directed one-way from performer to audience. It occurred to me that the ability to contact unseen conversants is a basic property of the auditory sense; it’s as old as our species and occurs every time we speak with someone in the dark or not in our line of sight. Phones become important when people are beyond shouting distance.

  Conversations between deaf signers provided a medium in which individuals could see but not hear their conversant. With my collaborator Karen Emmorey, I explored the emotional communication between them. We observed vocal laughter and associated social variables in conversations between deaf signers who were using American Sign Language. Despite their inability to hear their conversational partner, they laughed at the same places in the stream of signed speech, at similar material, and showed the same gender patterns of laughter as hearing individuals during vocal conversations. An emotionally rich dialog thus can be conducted with an exclusively visual medium that filters auditory signals and passes only visual ones. Less nuanced visual communication is ancient, and used when communicating beyond vocal range, via such signals as gestures, flags, lights, mirrors, or smoke.

  Text messaging, however—whether meaty e-mails or telegraphic tweets—involves conversants who can neither see nor hear each other and are not interacting in real time. My research team examined emotional communication online by analyzing the placement of 1,000 emoticons in Website text messages. Emoticons seldom interrupted phrases. For example, you may text, “You are going where on vacation? Lol” but not “You are—lol—going where on vacation?” Technophiles writing about text messaging sometimes justify emoticon use as a response to the “narrowing of bandwidth” characteristic of text messaging, ignoring that text viewed on a computer monitor or cell phone is essentially identical to that of the printed page. I suspect that emoticon use is a likely symptom of the limited literary prowess of texters. Know what I mean? Lol. Readers seeking the literary subtleties of irony, paradox, sarcasm, or sweet sorrow are unlikely to find it in text messages.

  The basic cell phone has morphed into a powerful mobile multimedia communication device and computer terminal that is a major driver of Internet society. It gives immediate, constant contact with select, distant conversants; can tell you where you are, where you should go next, and how to get there; provides diversions while waiting; and can document your journey with text, snaps, and video images. For some, this is enhanced reality, but it comes at the price of the here and now. Whatever your opinion and level of engagement, the cell phone and related Internet devices are profound social prostheses—almost brain implants—that have changed our lives and culture.

  Don’t Ring Me

  Aubrey de Grey

  Gerontologist; chief science officer, SENS Foundation; author (with Michael Rae), Ending Aging

  The Net changes the way I think in a bunch of ways that apply to more or less everyone, and especially to Edge question respondents, but there’s one effect it has on me that is probably rarer. And it’s not a change but an avoidance of a change.

  Before I switched to biology, I was a computer scientist; I have been using e-mail regularly since I was a student in the early 1980s. And I like e-mail—a lot. E-mail lets you think before you speak, on those frequent occasions when doing so would be a good idea. E-mail waits patiently for you to read it, and the sender isn’t offended if you reply a few hours or even a day after you get it. E-mail lets you speak in real sentences when you want to—and not in real sentences when you don’t.

  What might I be thinking of that so offensively lacks those qualities? No, not face-to-face interaction: I am as gregarious as anyone. Not snail mail, either—though I certainly use that medium far more rarely now than I did a decade or two ago. No, the object of my distaste is the greatest curse of the twenty-first century, the cell phone.

  It would take more words than we have been allowed for these pieces to do full justice to my loathing of the cell phone, so I won’t try. But you can probably guess that it doesn’t stop at the irritation caused when someone’s phone goes off in the middle of a lecture. A lot of it is the sheer rudeness that cell phones force their owners to commit, in situations where no such problem would otherwise exist: to wit, abruptly suspending a face-to-face conversation to take a call, or summarily telling someone to call
back because the person you’re talking to is more important. But most of it is the contrast with the civilized, relaxed, entirely adequate form of communication that I so prefer: e-mail.

  Yes, yes, you’re going to protest that one can always turn one’s phone off. That’s nonsense. If there’s one thing worse than being rung when you don’t want to be, it’s having someone ask you to ring them, doing so, and then getting their voice mail. Hello? If I wanted to tell you something without hearing your immediate response, I’d have sent you an e-mail (as I wanted to do in the first place).

  As the cell phone has become increasingly ubiquitous, I have come under increasing pressure to conform. So far I have resisted, and there is every sign that I shall continue to do so. How? Simply because I’m very well behaved with e-mail. With the few percent of e-mails I receive to which I want to take time to compose a reply, I take that time—but for the great majority, I’m fast. Really fast. It’s the best of both worlds: negligible slowdown in communication without the loss of that resource so rare and valuable to the busy high achiever, occasional but reliable solitude. And also without the other drawbacks I’ve mentioned. Put simply, I’m easy enough to interact with using e-mail. If the Internet didn’t exist, or if it weren’t so ubiquitous, I’d have been forced long ago to submit to the tyranny of the cell phone and I would be an altogether less nice person to know.

  A Thousand Hours a Year

  Simon Baron-Cohen

  Psychologist, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University; author, Autism and Asperger Syndrome: The Facts