Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  My concern, then, is this: How are we to develop new, more meaningful connections to our native communities if we are staring at computer screens that connect us only to an amorphous worldwide “community”? As is evident to anyone who has stood in a forest or on a seashore, there is a stark difference between a photograph or video and the real thing. Yes, I understand the great potential for the Internet to facilitate fact-finding, information sharing, and even community building by like-minded people. I am also struck by the radical democratization of information that the Internet may soon embody. But how are we to establish affective bonds locally if our lives are consumed by virtual experiences on global intermedia? What we need is uninterrupted solitude outdoors, sufficient time for the local sights, sounds, scents, tastes, and textures to seep into our consciousness. What we are seeing is children spending less and less time outdoors experiencing the real world and more and more time indoors immersed in virtual worlds.

  In effect, my argument is that the Internet may influence thinking indirectly through its unrelenting stranglehold on our attention and the resultant death (or at least denudation) of nonvirtual experience. If we are to care about larger issues surrounding sustainability, we first must care about our local places, which in turn necessitates direct experiences in those places. As Pyle observes, “What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?”

  One thing is certain: We have little time to get our act together. Nature, as they say, bats last. Ultimately, I can envision the Internet as a net positive or a net negative force in the critical sustainability effort, but I see no way around the fact that any positive outcome will involve us turning off the screens and spending significant time outside, interacting with the real world—in particular, the nonhuman world.

  The Collective Nature of Human Intelligence

  Matt Ridley

  Science writer; founding chairman, International Centre for Life; author, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

  The Internet is the ultimate mating ground for ideas, the supreme lekking arena for memes. Cultural and intellectual evolution depends on sex just as much as biological evolution does; otherwise they remain merely vertical transmission systems. Sex allows creatures to draw upon mutations that happen anywhere in their species. The Internet allows people to draw upon ideas that occur to anybody in the world. Radio and printing did this, too, and so did writing and before that language, but the Internet has made it fast and furious.

  Exchange and specialization are what makes cultural and intellectual evolution happen, and the Internet’s capacity for encouraging exchange encourages specialization too. Somebody somewhere knows the answer to any question I care to ask, and it is much easier to find him or her. Often it is an amateur, outside journalism or academia, who just happens to have a piece of knowledge at hand. An example: Suspicious of the claim that warm seas (as opposed to rapidly warming seas) would kill off coral reefs, I surfed the Net until I found the answer to the question, Is there any part of the oceans that is too hot for corals to grow? One answer lay in a blog comment from a diver just back from the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf, where he had seen diverse and flourishing coral reefs in 35˚C water (10 degrees warmer than much of the Great Barrier Reef).

  This has changed the way I think about human intelligence. I’ve never had much time for the academic obsession with intelligence. Highly intelligent people are sometimes remarkably stupid; stupid people sometimes make better leaders than clever ones. And so on. The reason, I realize, is that human intelligence is a collective phenomenon. If they exchange and specialize, a group of fifty dull-witted people can have a far higher collective intelligence than fifty brilliant people who don’t. That’s why it is utterly irrelevant if one race turns out to have higher IQ than another, or one company hires more people with higher IQs than another. I would rather be marooned on a desert island with a diverse group of mediocre people who know how to communicate than with a bunch of geniuses. The Internet is the latest and best expression of the collective nature of human intelligence.

  Six Ways the Internet May Save Civilization

  David Eagleman

  Neuroscientist; novelist; director, Laboratory for Perception and Action, Baylor College of Medicine; author, Sum

  The Internet has changed the way I think about the threat of societal collapse. When we learn of the empires that have tumbled before us, it is plausible to think that our civilization will follow the same path and eventually fall to a traditional malady—anything from epidemics to resource depletion. But the rapid advance of the Internet has thoroughly (and happily) changed my opinion about our customary existential threats. Here are six ways that the possession of a rapid and vast communication network will make us much luckier than our predecessors:

  1. Sidelining Epidemics

  One of the more dire prospects for collapse is an infectious disease epidemic. Bacterial or viral epidemics precipitated the fall of the golden age of Athens, the Roman Empire, and most empires of the Native Americans. The Internet can be our key to survival, because the ability to work telepresently can inhibit microbial transmission by reducing human-to-human contact. In the face of an otherwise devastating epidemic, businesses can keep supply chains running with the maximum number of employees working from home. This won’t keep everyone off the streets, but it can reduce host density below the tipping point. If we are well prepared when an epidemic arrives, we can fluidly shift into a self-quarantined society in which microbes fail due to host sparseness. Whatever the social ills of isolation, they bode worse for the microbes than for us.

  2. Availability of Knowledge

  Important discoveries have historically stayed local. Consider smallpox inoculation. This practice was under way in India, China, and Africa for at least a hundred years before it made its way to Europe. By the time the idea reached North America, the native civilizations had long collapsed. And information is not only hard to share but also hard to keep alive. Collections of learning from the library at Alexandria to the Mayan corpus have fallen to the bonfires of invaders or the winds of natural disaster. Knowledge is hard won but easily lost.

  The Internet addresses the problem of knowledge sharing better than any technology we’ve had. New discoveries latch on immediately: The information spreads widely and the redundancy prevents erasure. In this way, societies can use the latest bricks of knowledge in their fortification against existential threats.

  3. Speed by Decentralization

  We are witnessing the downfall of slow central control in the media: News stories are increasingly becoming user-generated nets of dynamically updated information. During the recent California wildfires, locals went to the TV stations to learn whether their neighborhoods were in danger. But the news stations appeared most concerned with the fate of celebrity mansions, so Californians changed their tack: They tweeted, uploaded geotagged cell phone pics, and updated Facebook. The Internet carried the news more quickly and accurately than any news station could. In this decentralized regime, there were embedded reporters on every neighborhood block, and the news shock wave kept ahead of the fire front. In the right circumstances, this head start could provide the extra hours that save us.

  4. Minimization of Censorship

  Political censorship has been a familiar specter in the last century, with state-approved news outlets ruling the press, airwaves, and copying machines in the former USSR, Romania, Cuba, China, Iraq, and other countries. In all these cases, censorship hobbled the society and fomented revolutions. Historically, a more successful strategy has been to confront free speech with free speech—and the Internet allows this in a natural way. It democratizes the flow of information by offering access to the newspapers of the world, the photographers of every nation, the bloggers of every political stripe. Some postings are full of doctoring and dishonesty, others strive for independence and impartiality, but all are available for the end user to sift through for reasoned consideration.


  5. Democratization of Education

  Most of the world does not have access to the education afforded to a small minority. For every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma, or Barack Obama who has the opportunity for education, there are uncountable others who never get the chance. This vast squandering of talent translates directly into reduced economic output. In a world where economic meltdown is often tied to collapse, societies are well advised to leverage all the human capital they have. The Internet opens the gates of education to anyone who can get her hands on a computer. This is not always a trivial task, but the mere feasibility redefines the playing field. A motivated teen anywhere on the planet can walk through the world’s knowledge, from Wikipedia to the curricula of MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

  6. Energy Savings

  It is sometimes argued that societal collapse can be cast in terms of energy: When energy expenditure begins to outweigh energy return, collapse ensues. The Internet addresses the energy problem with a kind of natural ease. Consider the huge energy savings inherent in the shift from snail mail to e-mail. As recently as the last decade, information was amassed not in gigabytes but in cubic meters of filing cabinets. Beyond convenience, it may be that the technological shift from paper to electrons is critical to the future. Of course, there are energy costs to the banks of computers that underpin the Internet, but these costs are far less than the forests and coal beds and oil deposits that would be depleted for the same quantity of information flow.

  The tangle of events that trigger societal collapse can be complex, and there are several existential threats the Internet does not address. Nonetheless, it appears that vast, networked communication can serve as an antidote to several of the most common and fatal diseases of civilization. Almost by accident, we now command the capacity for self-quarantining, retaining knowledge, speeding information flow, reducing censorship, actualizing human capital, and saving energy resources. So the next time a co-worker laments about Internet addiction, the banality of tweets, or the decline of face-to-face conversation, I will sanguinely suggest that the Internet—even with all its flashy wastefulness—just might be the technology that saves us.

  Better Neuroxing Through the Internet

  Samuel Barondes

  Director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco; author, Better Than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs

  Years ago, when Xerox machines first came to libraries, many of us breathed a sigh of relief. Instead of copying passages from journals in our barely legible script, we could put the important pages on the scanner and print a good replica that we could turn to whenever we liked. The process soon became so cheap that we could duplicate whole articles we were interested in, and then even articles we might be interested in. Soon we had piles of this stuff wherever we turned.

  The biologist Sydney Brenner, who likes to pepper his research with observations about human folly, quickly realized that this technology also provided new opportunities for wasting time, because many people were photocopying and filing a lot of irrelevant papers instead of carefully reading and remembering the key points of the most significant ones. This led to his playful warning that it is much more important to be “neuroxing” than Xeroxing.

  Brenner’s famous caveat didn’t do much to shorten the copier lines. But the Internet did. Instead of collecting reprints by feeding the machine one page at a time, the Internet allows us to build personal libraries of PDFs just by clicking on links. It also allows us to keep up to date on the matters we are especially interested in by setting up alerts and to keep sampling new fields in as much depth as we choose.

  And the good news is that by eliminating our reliance on libraries and copiers while instantaneously providing user-friendly access to information, this new technology is clearly facilitating intellectual activities rather than getting in their way. This is not to say that the Internet is free of time-wasting temptations. But if you want the latest and most relevant data about whatever you are interested in, the Internet can bring much of it to you in the blink of an eye. All ready to be neuroxed.

  A Gift to Conspirators and Terrorists Everywhere

  Marcel Kinsbourne

  Neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist, the New School; author, Children’s Learning and Attention Problems

  The Internet has supplied me with an answer to a question that has exercised me interminably: When I reach Heaven (surely!), how can I possibly spend infinite time without incurring infinite boredom? Well, as long as they provide an Internet connection, I now see that I can.

  The instant response, correct or otherwise, to every question sets up an intellectual Ponzi scheme. The answer multiplies the questions, which, in a potentially infinite progress, prompt yet more. Having previously functioned in serial fashion, digging for new vistas through largely unexplored libraries, I now have to neither interact with any other human being nor even move, except my fingers. And I can pursue as many ideas in parallel as I want. The only hitch is the desire of various business concerns to make me pay for the information I crave. Once we have reached the stage of having universal Internet access implanted in our brains, even that will no longer be a problem, because we will be dealing in thoughts, and thoughts are famously considered to be free, if not gratuitous.

  Multiplied by a multitude, and compounded over time, this proliferation of ideas will offer a potential for stacking invention on invention, scaling up to accomplishments undreamed by science fiction. And that will be just as well, because of the countervailing menace of the Internet. Here’s why.

  Evolution, generally a good thing, comes with two intractable problems: It is excruciatingly slow, and it is totally lacking in foresight (that is, its design is seriously unintelligent). The progeny lives with the unforeseen consequences.

  Our near-human ancestors were scattered in small groups across inhospitable and predator-infested savanna. Individuals ruthless and cruel enough to repel those competing for scarce resources were favored by natural selection, did their thing, and the species survived. Their inborn fury knew no bounds, which was not then much of a problem for external reasons: the bounds set on their ability to destroy by the short range of their weaponry (clubs), their sluggish transportation (legs), and their feeble vehicle of communication (voice), unable to reach outside their band to conjoin with others similarly inclined so as to wreak havoc in substantial numbers. But as cultural innovation outstripped evolution with exponential momentum, the means for harm gained efficacy. In the meantime, the destroyers persisted as small minorities in every population group, although as resources have become less scarce, their assistance to help the group survive has (or should have) become less and less needed.

  Advances in weaponry have brought us to the point of being able to deliver havoc to all parts of Earth and at great speed. Only communication lagged behind in recent years, though radio and television did begin to infiltrate and integrate greater masses of the population. Yet the human population grew and grew, despite the massacre of multitudes by those so inclined. It seemed for a shining moment in history that the constructive was outstripping destructive. But nothing succeeds as planned.

  How to coordinate limited numbers of like-minded destroyers the world over, so as collectively to inflict maximum harm? Use the Internet, Web networks, to recruit and plan; it is a gift to conspirators and terrorists everywhere. The pace of the arms race is accelerating, while evolution is left way behind. Terror becomes globalized, and through it the prospect of global suicide. Why would human beings want that? Because it is in their nature.

  Consider the frog and the scorpion. Give me a ride across the stream. But you will sting me. and I will die, replies the frog. But then I would drown, argues the scorpion. The frog swims, carrying his passenger, feels an ominous sting. Why? he asks. Because it is my nature, replies the scorpion.

  Natural selection selects but cannot explain why. After all, there is no one there to explain. So those nat
urally selected act according to their nature, then and now (but now with far greater reach). Blame it on unintelligent design.

  There is a dynamic of cumulative invention in the human brain. A dynamic of insensate destruction is also inherent in the human brain. Behold the ultimate great arms race, brought to a head by the Internet, which acts as a double agent, aiding and energizing both sides. Will it perfect the species or drive it into extinction? The cockroaches will bear witness.

  The Ant Hill

  Eva Wisten

  Journalist; author, Single in Manhattan

  When you’re on a plane, watching the cars below and the blinking, moving workings of a city, it’s easy to believe that everything is connected—just moving parts in the same system. If you’re one of the drivers on the ground, driving your car from B to A, the perspective is, of course, different. The driver feels very much like an individual—car to match your personality, on the way to your chosen destination. The driver never feels like a moving dot in a row of a very large number of other moving dots.

  The Internet sometimes makes me suspect I’m that driver. The merging (often invisible) of many disparate systems is steering my behavior into all kinds of paths, which I can only hope are beneficial. The visible connectedness through the Web has maybe not changed how I think but has increased the number of people whose thoughts are in my head. Because of the Internet, the memes and calculations of more and more people (and/or computers) pass through us. Good or bad, this new level of connectedness sometimes makes me feel that if I could only hover a few feet off the ground, what I would see is an ant hill. All the ants, looking so different and special up close, seem suspiciously alike from this height. This new tool for connections has made more ants available every time I need to transport a twig, just as there are more ants in the way when I want to set down the picnic basket.