Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

With the Internet, what happens in that forest is exactly as close as anything else I want to understand or communicate (give or take the slow phone line or cell phone reception). When an oil company pushes a road far closer to a reserve than it promised, we’ll know about it immediately. When some settlers try to clear forest, we’ll know just as quickly if they’re killing Indians and if the Indians are killing them. So will everyone else.

  The Internet is instant news from remote places, with photos to prove it. What we now think about is suddenly much larger, more frightening, and far more challenging than it once was.

  The Internet has vastly more coverage of everything: immediate, future, and past. So when we want to know who has signed which oil exploration leases for which tracts of remote forest, the data are not in Duke’s library (or anyone else’s), but I can get them online from the Websites of local newspapers. And I can do that in the forest clearing, surrounded by those who futures have been signed away. Knowledge is now everywhere. You can find it from everywhere, too.

  The Internet has vastly increased the size of the problem set about humanity’s future. Some problems now look really puny. They probably always were.

  Who does the thinking has changed, too. When knowledge is everywhere, so are the thinkers.

  A Miracle and a Curse

  Ed Regis

  Science writer; author, What Is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

  The Internet is not changing the way I think (nor, as far as I know, the way anyone else thinks). To state the matter somewhat naïvely, I continue to think the same way I always thought: by using my brain and my five (or six) senses and considering the relevant available information. I mean, how else can you think?

  What it has changed for me is my use of time. The Internet is simultaneously the world’s greatest time saver and the greatest time waster in history. I’m reduced to stating the obvious with regard to time saving: The Web embodies practically the whole of human knowledge and most of it is only a mouse click away. An archive search that in the past might have taken a week, plus thousands of miles of travel, can now be done at blitz speeds in the privacy of your own home or office, et cetera.

  The flip side, however, is that the Internet is also the world’s greatest time sink. This was explicitly acknowledged as a goal by the pair of twenty-something developers of one of the famous Websites or browsers or search engines, I forget which (it may have been Yahoo!), who once said, “We developed this thing so that you don’t have to waste time to start wasting time. Now you can start wasting time right away.”

  As indeed you can. In the newsprint age, I studiously avoided reading the papers on the dual grounds that (1) the news from day to day is pretty much the same (“Renewed fighting in Bosnia,” “Suicide bomber kills X people in Y city”), and (2) in most cases you can do absolutely nothing about it anyway. Besides, it’s depressing.

  These days, though, while the news content remains the same as before, I am a regular reader of the New York Times online, plus of course Google News, plus my local paper. Plus I check the stock market many times daily, along with the weather and Doppler radar, blogs (where I sometimes get into stupid, mind-sapping, time-eating flame wars), the listservs I subscribe to, Miata.net (for any spiffy new Miata products or automotive gossip), my e-mail . . . and this doesn’t even half cover the Homeric catalog of Internet ships that I sail on from day to day.

  Of course, I don’t have to do any of this stuff. No one forces me to. I can blame only myself. Still, the Internet is seductive—which is odd, considering that it’s so passive an agency. It doesn’t actually do anything. It hasn’t cured cancer, the common cold, or even hiccups.

  The Internet is a miracle and a curse. Mostly a miracle.

  “The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data”

  Lisa Randall

  Physicist, Harvard University; author, Warped Passages

  “The plural of anecdote is not data”—but anecdotes are all I have. We don’t yet understand how we think or what it means to change the way we think. Scientists are making inroads and ultimately hope to understand much more. But right now, all I and my fellow contributors can do are make observations and generalize.

  We don’t even know if the Internet changes the way we read. It certainly changes how we do many aspects of our work. Maybe it ultimately changes how our brains process written information, but we don’t yet know. Still, the question of how the Internet changes the way we think is an enormous problem, one that anecdotes might help us understand. So I’ll tell a couple (if I can focus long enough to do so).

  Someone pointed out to me once that he, like me, never uses a bookmark in a book. I always attributed my negligence to disorganization and laziness—the few times I attempted to use a bookmark I promptly misplaced it. But what I realized after this was pointed out is that not using bookmarks was my choice. It doesn’t make sense to find a place in a book that you have begun reading but that is so far from your memory that you don’t remember having read it. By not using a bookmark, I was guaranteed to return to the last continuous section of text that had actually made a dent in my brain.

  With the Internet, we tend to absorb multiple pieces of information about whatever topic we decide we’re interested in. Online, we search. Marvin Minsky recently told me that he prefers reading on an electronic device because he values the search function. And I certainly do, too. In fact, I tend to remember the answers to the pointed questions I ask on the Internet better than the information I pick up reading a long book. But there is also the danger that something valuable about reading in a linear fashion, absorbing information internally and processing it as we go along, is lost with the Internet, or even electronic devices—where it is too easy to cheat by searching.

  One aspect of reading a newspaper that I’ve already lost a lot of is the randomness that that kind of reading offers. Today, when I’m staring at a computer screen and have to click to get to an article, I read only those I know will interest me. When I read print papers—something I do less and less—my eyes are sometimes drawn to an interesting piece (or even an advertisement) that I never would have chosen to look for. Despite its breadth, and the fact that I can be so readily distracted, I still use the Internet in a targeted fashion.

  So why don’t I stick to print media? The Internet is great for disorganized people like me who don’t want to throw something away for fear of losing something valuable they missed. I love knowing that everything is still online and that I can find it. I hate newspapers piling up. I love not having to be in an office to check books. I can make progress at home, on a train, or on a plane (when there is enough room between rows to open my computer). Of course, as a theoretical physicist, I could do that before as well—it just meant carrying a lot more weight.

  And I do often take advantage of the Internet’s breadth, even if my attention is a little more directed. A friend might send me to a Website. Or I might just need or want to learn about some new topic. The Internet also allows me to be bolder. I can quickly get up to speed on a topic I previously knew nothing about. I can check facts, and I can learn others’ points of view on any subject I decide is interesting. I can write about subjects I wouldn’t have dared to touch before, since I can quickly find out the context that was previously much more difficult to access.

  Which brings me to the title quote, “The plural of anecdote is not data.” I thought I should check, on Google, who deserves the attribution. It’s not entirely clear, but it might be a pharmacologist named Frank Kotsonis, who was writing about the effects of aspartame. I find this particularly funny, because I stopped consuming aspartame due to my personal anecdotal evidence that it made me focus less well. But I digress.

  Here’s the truly funny aspect of the quote. The original, from Berkeley political scientist Raymond Wolfinger, was exactly the opposite: “The plural of anecdote is data.” I’m guessing this depends on what kind of science you do.

  The fact is that
the Internet provides a wealth of information. It doesn’t yet organize it all or process it or arrange it for scientific conclusions. The Internet allows us (as a group) to believe both facts and their opposites; we’ll find supporting evidence for all opinions.

  But we can attend talks without being physically present and work with people we’ve never met in person. We have access to all physics papers as they are churned out, but we still have to figure out which are interesting and process what they say.

  I don’t know how differently we think because of the Internet. But we certainly work differently and at a different pace. We can learn many anecdotes that aren’t yet data.

  Though all those distracting e-mails and Websites can make it hard to focus!

  Collective Action and the Global Commons

  Giulio Boccaletti

  Physicist, atmospheric and oceanic scientist; associate principal, McKinsey and Company

  The Internet has most definitely changed the way I think about collective action and the effect of science on decision making, particularly when it comes to managing the global environment. Three things come to mind: the Internet’s role in providing a platform for taking collective action on environmental problems; its ability to focus our collective consciousness from multidisciplinary issues to one problem, the management of planet Earth; and its effect on the pressures that science is subject to as it deals with this new concern for all things planetary.

  The global commons in which we operate—water resources; the carbon stock of the atmosphere, land, and oceans; tropical forests—easily exceed national boundaries, making traditional top-down decisions about management difficult. However, these global commons are fully encompassed by global networked information systems, which therefore provide—beyond access to information—a platform that enables the matching of information to action for those who see an opportunity. And if we take a step back from the short-term progress on policy convergence, this is what can be observed across the world:

  Businesses and governments are steering productive efforts toward those global commons in what many now call the green economy, using networks to do so. This is a world where farmers in the extensive irrigation systems of the Indus plains of Pakistan or the Australian Murray-Darling basin can find out online, in real time, how much water they are allocated and thus plan their agricultural activities; where conservation programs for tropical forests in Brazil or Indonesia (critical components of our global strategy to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions) are planned using global mapping technologies; where we can use networked platforms to coordinate millions of individual decisions on consumption and production of energy through smart grids (information-laden networks for power transmission); where weather data can be acted upon across the globe. And where, for the first time, large-scale interventions in Earth’s climate, such as attempts to increase carbon capture by the ocean, are being considered by ventures that already assume a fully networked world.

  There used to be an edifice of data and theories inaccessible to all except for the few whose job it was to study Earth. In an attempt to create an integrated story, Earth scientists carefully built this edifice with layer after layer of complicated charts—global temperature fields, wind distribution, land use, geology, ice cover—and their theories drew on disparate disciplines to create an ambitious if incomplete picture of what Earth looks like and, most important, how it functions and how it might change.

  To the vast majority of the public, though, this endeavor meant little if anything. An International Geophysical Year was proclaimed from July 1957 through December 1958—a sort of race to the Earth—but the only global event to reach the collective consciousness out of this ambitious program was the Soviet launch of Sputnik in October 1957, heralding the beginnings of the race to space instead. When I started in Earth studies more than a decade ago, Earth science departments were struggling to attract the best students away from engineering and physics departments, planetary issues were under the radar for most MBA students, and the closest businesses got to them was using a picture of the globe as their logo. Earth as an integrated collection of large-scale processes was not a consideration for most people; at best, it was an unvarying venue, the place where we lived our lives, a place we could rely on to, well, be there.

  The widespread adoption of global information networks changed all this, allowing access to data and theories, often without the mediation of scientists, spreading ideas and encouraging public debate. And that edifice—the colorful maps representing various aspects of the planet’s identity, the carefully compiled data—became an interactive, multidimensional space owned by no one and explored by a wide set of agents. It was a space where our planet (and our role in maintaining or exploiting it) became the subject of intense political, economic, and social interest.

  The Internet has given rise to one of the largest instances of collective realization witnessed thus far: People, governments, and businesses across the globe have come to understand, more or less at the same time, that the Earth is not an academic abstraction but an entity we interact with, which we can affect by our daily activities and which in turn affects us. The Internet has created what the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard might have thought of as a new concept of knowledge of the Earth—a worldview created not by individuals but by a collective act of negotiation.

  Finally, there is the influence of the Internet on science itself and the pressures that science is subject to. As a scientist, I was trained to understand the limits of what the Earth sciences can say—to develop a feel for the inherent uncertainties hidden in the complexity of our planet’s observed phenomena. But in what turns out to be a strikingly recursive story, the new conceptual and integrated model for the Earth, born out of the work of thousands of Earth scientists and crystallized in the collective consciousness by global access to information, is having a profound effect on the questions I see science being called to answer.

  Now that Earth has been transformed by the Internet from an object of study to an interactive environment that all are able to explore—a place where economic demands and social issues collide with the disciplinary boundaries of the scientific community—science is being forced to confront operational and applied issues. Choices on where to place offshore wind turbines, for example, have a lot to do with where we believe the global circulation of the atmosphere will end up delivering most of the momentum it picks up in the tropics. Concerns about the viability of the hydropower infrastructure are tied to our understanding of variability in the global hydrological cycle. Questions about the future of carbon capture and sequestration are fundamentally tied to our understanding of geology and biogeochemistry.

  How should we plan for a changing climate? Where should we invest? What new technologies should we adopt? Such are the questions that science must answer. The challenge lies in making sure that along with the knowledge, the limits of what science can tell us (and therefore the boundaries of what we can do) are not lost in translation as they travel through the Internet.

  Informed, Tightfisted, and Synthetic

  Laurence C. Smith

  Professor of geography and Earth and space sciences, University of California, Los Angeles; author, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future

  I remember very well the day when the Internet began changing the way I think. It happened in the spring of 1993, in a drab, windowless computer lab at Cornell. One of my fellow graduate students (a former Microsoft programmer who liked to stay abreast of things) had drawn a crowd around his flickering UNIX box. I shouldered my way in, then became transfixed as his fingers flew over XMosaic, the first widely available Web browser in the world.

  XMosaic was only months old. It had been written at the University of Illinois by an undergraduate named Marc Andreessen (a year later he would launch Netscape, its multibillion-dollar successor) and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications. There were already some Websites up and runnin
g. Urged on by his crowd’s word search suggestions (“Sex!” “Kurt Cobain!” “Landsat!”), my fellow student lifted the curtain on a new world of commerce, entertainment, and scientific exchange in barely fifteen minutes. A sense that something important was happening filled the lab. By the next day everyone was using XMosaic.

  How has my thinking changed since that day in 1993? Like almost everyone, I’ve become both more addicted to information and more informed. With so much knowledge at my fingertips, I am far less tolerant of my own ignorance. If I don’t know something, I look it up. Today I flip through dozens of newspapers a day, when before I barely read one. Too many hours of my life are consumed in this way, and other tasks neglected, but I am perpetually educated in return.

  I am now more economics-minded than before. In 1992, if I had to fly someplace, I called the travel agent who worked around the corner and accepted whatever she said was a good fare. Today I thrash competing search engines to shake the last nickel out of a plane ticket. Before shopping online, I hunt and peck for secret discount codes. This superabundance of explicit pricing information has instilled in me an obsessive thriftiness I did not possess before. Doubtless it has helped contribute to thousands of excellent travel agents losing their jobs, and even more hours of time wasted.

  The pace and scale of my branch of science have become turbocharged. Unlike before, when scientific data were hard to get, expensive, and prized, my students and I now freely post or download enormous volumes at little or no cost. We ingest streaming torrents of satellite images and climate model simulations in near real time; we post our own torrents online for free use by unseen others around the planet. In a data-rich world, a new aesthetic of sharing, transparency, and collaboration has emerged to supplant the old one of data hoarding and secretiveness. Earth science has become an extraordinarily exciting, vibrant, and fast-advancing field as a result.