Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  However, in the Internet Age, the complete extinguishing never really happens, especially for prominent or prolific users. For example, the number of Internet searchers for something you wrote may asymptotically approach zero over the decades, but it will never quite reach zero. Given the ubiquity of the Internet, its databases, and search engines, someone a hundred years from now may smile at something you wrote or wonder about who you were. You may become part of this future person’s own IPB as he navigates through life. In the future, simulacra of you, derived in part from your Internet activities, will be able to converse with future generations.

  Moreover, studies show that individuals within your social network have a profound influence on your personal health and happiness through your contacts on the Internet (whom you usually know) and their friends (whom you may not know). Habits and ideas spread like a virus through a vast Web of interconnectivity. Behaviors can sometimes skip links—spreading to a friend of a friend without affecting the person who connects them. In summary, in the age of the Internet, the concept of you and personhood is more diffuse than ever before.

  Because your interests, decision-making capabilities, habits, and even health are so intertwined with those of others, your personhood is better defined as a pseudo-personhood that is composed of yourself and the assembly of your IPBs out to at least three degrees of network separation. When we die, the Web of interconnectivity becomes torn, but one’s pseudo-personhood, in some sense, continues to spread, like a soliton wave on a shoreless sea of Internet connections.

  When Marc Chagall was asked to explain why he became a painter, he said that a painting was like a window through which he “could have taken flight toward another world.” Chagall explored the boundaries between the real and unreal. “Our whole inner world is reality,” he once wrote, “perhaps more real still than the apparent world.”

  As the notion of IPBs and soliton personhood expands, this kind of boundary will become even more blurred. The IPBs become of Chagallian importance and encourage the use of new windows on the world. They foster a different kind of immortality, form of being, and flight.

  Immortality

  Juan Enriquez

  CEO, Biotechonomy; founding director, Harvard Business School’s Life Sciences Project; author, The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future

  The most important impact on my life and yours is that the Internet grants immortality. Think of your old archaeology/sociology/history course, or your visits to various museums. Think of how painstakingly arrowheads, outhouses, bones, beads, textiles, and sentence fragments have been discovered, uncovered, studied, and preserved.

  But these few scraps have provided real knowledge while leaving large lagoons filled with conjecture, theories, speculation, and outright fairy tales. Despite this, we still know an awful lot about a very few. Because most of our knowledge of the past depends on very little about very few, the story of very few lives survives.

  As we got better at transmitting and preserving data, we learned quite a bit more about much more. Biographies could rely not just on letters, songs, and folktales but also on increasingly complete business ledgers, bills of sale, newspapers, and government and religious records.

  By the time of the last great typhoid epidemics and fires in the United States and Europe, we could trace the history of specific houses, families, wells, cows, and outhouses. We could build a specific history of a neighborhood, a family, an individual. But there were still those large lagoons in our knowledge. Not so today. Any electronic archaeologist, sociologist, or historian examining our e-lives would be able to understand, map, compute, contrast, and judge our lives in a degree of detail incomprehensible to any previous generation. Think of a single day of our lives. Almost the first thing we do after turning off the alarm—before brushing our teeth, having our coffee, seeing to a child, or opening a newspaper—is reach for that iPhone or BlackBerry. As it comes on and speaks to us, or we speak through it, it continues to create a map of almost everything in our lives.

  Future sociologists and archaeologists will have access to excruciatingly detailed pictures, on an individual basis, of what arrived, what was read, ignored, deleted, forwarded, and responded to. Complement this stream of data with Facebook, Twitter, Google, blogs, newspapers, analyst reports, and Flickr, and you get a far more concrete and complete picture of each and every one of us than even the most extraordinary detail historians have unearthed on the most studied and respected (or reviled) of world leaders.

  And by the way, this cache is decentralized. It exists and multiplies at various sites. Digging through the Egyptian pyramids will look like child’s play compared to what future scholars will find at Google, Microsoft, the National Security Agency, credit bureaus, or any host of parallel universes.

  It is virtually impossible to edit or eliminate most traces of our lives today, and for better or worse we have now achieved what the most powerful Egyptians and Greeks always sought—immortality.

  So, how has this newfound immortality affected my thinking? Well, those of a certain age learned long ago, from the triumphs and tragedies of the Greek gods, that there are clear rules separating the mortal and immortal. Trespasses that are tolerated and forgiven in the fallible human being have drastic consequences for gods. In the immortal world, all is not forgiven and mostly forgotten after you shuffle off to Heaven.

  A Third Replicator

  Susan Blackmore

  Psychologist; author, Consciousness: An Introduction

  The way “I” think? I’m not sure that I know anymore who or what is doing the thinking. That’s the question the Internet is forcing me to ask.

  When I was just a human being, writing books and research papers or appearing on radio and television, I could happily imagine that “I” wrote my books. I didn’t need to question who or what was doing the thinking or having the new ideas. In those days, body, brain, and knowledge were all bound up together in one place. To use an old metaphor, hardware, software, and data were all bound up in one entity; it was reasonable to call it “me.”

  The Internet has changed all that. It has changed both the nature of selves and the nature of thinking. “I” am no longer just the imagined inner conscious self who inhabits this body but also the smiling face on my Website and the fictional character other people write about in cyberspace. If someone asks, “Who is Sue Blackmore?” this body will have less say in the answer than the questioner’s search engine.

  The change to thinking itself began gradually. Humans have long outsourced their knowledge to paper and books, so in the old days I would sit at my desk with my typewriter and look up things I needed to know in books in my own or the university’s library. Then I got a word processor. This new hardware shifted a little of the work, but all the creative thinking still went on inside my head, taking in countless old memes and bringing them together to make new ones, selecting among the results, and writing just a few of them down.

  Then came the Internet. This meant I could communicate with more people, which meant more mixing of ideas but did not change the process fundamentally. The real change was the advent of the World Wide Web. Suddenly—and in retrospect it really does seem to have been sudden—masses of information were available, right there on my desk. Almost overnight, I stopped using the university library. Indeed, I haven’t physically been there for years now.

  The Web needed search engines, and these changed the world amazingly quickly. By sifting through mountains of data and coming up with relevant items, they took over a large part of what used to be human thinking.

  I like to see all this in evolutionary terms. The creativity of an evolutionary process depends on the three processes of copying, varying, and selecting information. First we had genes—replicators that banded together to create organisms. Then we had memes— replicators that worked together to create human minds. Now we have a third replicator and a new process of creative evolution. All those computers, programs, se
rvers, cables, and other essentials of the Internet might once have seemed to be hardly more than an extension of books, typewriters, and telephones, but we should no longer see them that way.

  Books, typewriters, and telephones store information or pass it on, but they do not select the information they copy. They can vary the information by poor-quality copying, but they cannot put together old memes to make new ones. The Internet, or parts of the Internet, can.

  Out there in cyberspace are search engines and kinds of software that copy, vary, and select information, concocting new combinations and passing them around the globe in microseconds, making the results available to us all. This is truly a new evolutionary process—one that deals in ideas, one that creates images and original texts. Thinking has escaped from the human scale.

  These days I still sit at my desk, but I am not just a human being thinking and writing down my thoughts. The keyboard I type on is recognizably like my old typewriter, but the process I am engaged in is nothing like it was before. Now as I write, I jump quickly and often to things other people have written. I call up pages of information selected by software I do not understand and incorporate these into the text I am working on. This new text may go straight onto my Website or a blog, and from there it may, or may not, be picked up by other sites and copied again. Even books partake of this extraordinary creative process, with Google scanning and propagating pages to students, other writers, and bloggers. No one can possibly know where all the copies and fragments of copies have gone, how many times they have been copied or by what process they were selected. Ever more of the copying, varying, and selecting goes on outside human brains and outside human control.

  Is the Internet itself thinking? I would say yes—or if not, it is on the verge of doing so. The digital information it passes around is a third replicator, a kind of information that is copied, varied, and selected by the massive machinery of the Internet and the Web.

  So how has the Internet changed the way I think? The words I am writing now are far less “mine” than they were before. Indeed, they have been created as much by John Brockman, the Edge community, and the entire Internet as by little me. I did not so much write them as they used me to get themselves written.

  So the answer is not that the Internet is changing the way I think; it is changing the nature of thinking itself.

  Bells and Smoke

  Christine Finn

  Archaeologist, journalist; author, Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley

  I saw in the new decade wrapped against the English Channel chill under one of the few surviving time ball towers in the world. It was hardly a Times Square ball drop but my personal nod to a piece of eighteenth-century tech that was a part of communications history—ergo, a link to the Internet. For years, this slim landmark signaled navigators off the white cliffs of Dover to set their chronometers to Greenwich Mean Time. It was a Twitter ball, with just one message to relay.

  History is my way in, this year. I am answering this year’s Edge question against the deadline, as the answer slips as defiantly as time. The Internet has not only changed the way I think but prompted me to think about those changes over time, weighted by the unevenness of technology take-up and accessibility to the Net.

  I encountered the Web as a researcher at Oxford in the mid-1990s. I learned later that I was at Tim Berners-Lee’s former college, but I was pretty blasé about being easily online. I saw the Internet more as a resource for messaging, a faster route than the bike-delivered pigeon post. I didn’t see it as a tool for digging, and I remained resolutely buried in books. But when I visited nonacademic friends and asked if I could check e-mails on their dial-ups, I began to equate the Net with privilege, via phone bill anxiety. As they hovered nervously, I dived in and out again. The Internet was not a joy but a catch-up mechanism. And for a while I couldn’t think about it any other way.

  In 2000, something happened. I found myself drawn to write a book about Silicon Valley. Moving frequently between the United Kingdom and America’s East and West Coasts, I began to think about the implications of the Internet and, moreover, about how being unable to get online was starting to affect me. What was I missing intellectually and culturally by being sometimes out of the game? I began to appreciate a new hunger, for a technology that was still forming. I knew that all that information was out there, and I couldn’t realize its potential; sometimes I believed that ignorance was bliss. Traveling around America by bus and train for several months was a revelation. At every stop, I tried to get online, which usually meant I waited in line. I relished my log-on gifts: a precious thirty minutes at the New York Public Library, a whole hour at small towns in the Midwest, a grabbed few minutes in a university department before giving a lecture somewhere.

  Then—joy!—luxuriating in the always-on technology at my friends’ homes in the Bay Area, where even the kitchens had laptops. But as I made those flights east, the differential was widening. I lost hours trawling the streets of European cities for an Internet café, only to feel that it was merely a brushed kiss from a stranger; there would always be someone else in line. I had had a taste, and I knew that tech was building on tech out there in the ether. I was like some Woody Allen character gazing out of a car window into a train full of revelers. Being barred from the Web felt like a personal blow; I’d lost the key to the library.

  In 2004, I moved to Rome just as the Indian Ocean tsunami was showing how the Internet could be mobilized for the common good. I made my first post. I began my own blog, charting Rome’s art and culture for Stanford’s Metamedia Lab. The pope was declining, and by March 2005 St. Peter’s square was mushrooming with satellite dishes. In the Sistine Chapel, God and Adam were connecting on Michelangelo’s ceiling; outside, fingers were twitching on laptops and cell phones for one of the Internet’s seminal news moments. But I heard the news the old-fashioned way. Walking home with a bag of warm pizza, I heard a sudden churning of bells when it was not the marking of the hour. As I ran with the thousands to St. Peter’s, I recall feeling moved by these parallel communications; here, people could still be summoned by bells. A few weeks later, while I was watching wide-screen TV in a Roman café, white smoke rose from the Vatican chimney. The ash drifted over the Vatican’s ancient walls, morphing into a messaging cacophony of Italian cell phones and clattering keyboards in heaving Internet cafés.

  Dare, Care, and Share

  Tor Nørretranders

  Science writer; consultant; lecturer; author, The Generous Man: How Helping Others Is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do

  The more you give, the more you get. The more you share, the more they care. The more you dare, the more is there for you. Dare, care, and share.

  The Internet has become the engine of gift economy and cooperation. The simple insight that there is so much more knowledge, data, and wisdom out there than I can ever attend to in a lifetime shows me that life is not about collecting information into a depot of books, theorems, or rote memories. Life is about sharing with others what you have. Use it, share it, gather it when you need it. There is plenty out there.

  In ecology, the waste of one organism is the food of another. Plants produce oxygen as a waste product; animals need it to live. We produce carbon dioxide as waste; plants require it. To live is to be able to share your waste.

  Human civilization seems to have forgotten that, through centuries of building and isolating waste depots and exploiting limited resources. Now we are learning that it is all about flows: matter, energy, information, social links. They all flow through us. We share them with one another and all other inhabitants of this planet. The climate problem shows us what happens if we ignore the idea that renewable flows are the real stuff, whereas depots and fortresses are illusions in the long run.

  The Internet makes us think in the right way: pass it on, let it go, let it flow. Thinking is renewed. Now we need only to change the way we act.

  Getting Close

  Stuart Pimm

 
Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Duke University; author, The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth

  Once upon a time, we had the same world we do now. We knew little about its problems.

  Wise men and women pontificated about their complete worlds—worlds that, for some, stretched only to the limits of their city centers, or sometimes only to the borders of their colleges’ grounds. This allowed them clever conceits about what was really important in life, art, science, and the rest of it. Lesser minds would come to pay homage and, let’s be honest, use the famous library, since that was the only way of knowing what was known and who knew it. The centers ruled and knew it.

  Darkness is falling when I see the light on in the lab and stop by to see who else is working late. There’s a conversation going on over Skype. It’s totally incomprehensible. Even its sounds are unfamiliar. There’s no Rosetta Stone software for the language my two students are learning from their correspondent, who sits in a café in a wretched oiltown on the edge of the rain forest in Ecuador. It’s spoken only by a few hundred Indians. All but their children were born as nomads, in a forest that has the luck to be sitting on billions of barrels of oil. (I didn’t say “good luck.”) In a few months, we’ll be in that forest. My students will improve their language skills with the Indian women, helping them prepare chicha by chewing manioc, spitting it into the bowl, and chewing another mouthful.