Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  Perhaps the most profound change in my thinking is that the new ease of information access has allowed me to synthesize broad new ideas, drawing from fields of scholarship outside my own. It took less than two years for me to finish a book identifying important convergent trends not only in climate science (my area of expertise) but also in globalization, population demographics, energy, political science, geography, and law. While a synthesis of such scope might well have been possible without the light-speed world library of the Internet, I for one never would have attempted it.

  Before 1993, my thinking was complacent, spendthrift, and narrow. Now it is informed, tightfisted, and synthetic. I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

  Massive Collaboration

  Andrew Lih

  University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism; author, The Wikipedia Revolution

  What has changed my way of thinking is the ability of the Internet to support the deliberative aggregation of information, through filtering and refinement of independent voices, to create unprecedented works of knowledge.

  Wikipedia is the greatest creation of massive collaboration so far. That we have a continuously updated, working draft of history capturing the state of human knowledge down to the granularity of each second is unique in human experience.

  Wikipedia and now Twitter as generic technical platforms have allowed participants to modify and optimize the virtual workspace to evolve new norms through cultural negotiation. With only basic general directives, participants implicitly evolve new community conventions through online stigmergic collaboration.

  With the simple goal of writing an encyclopedia, Wikipedians developed guidelines regarding style, deliberation, and conflict resolution and crafted community software measures to implement them. In the Twitter universe, retweeting and hashtags organically crafted by users extended the microblogging concept to fit emerging community desires. This virtual blacksmithing in both the Wikipedia and Twitter workspaces supports a form of evolvable media “impossibly” supported by the Internet.

  So far, our deep experiences with this form of collaboration have been in the domain of textual data. We see this also in journalistic endeavors that seek truth in public documents and records. News organizations such as Talking Points Memo and the Guardian have mobilized the crowd to successfully tackle hundreds of thousands of pages of typically intractable data dumps. Mature text tools for searching, differential comparison, and relational databases have made all this possible.

  We have only started to consider the implications in the visual and multimedia domain. Today we lack the sufficient tools to do so, but we will see more collaborative creation, editing, and filtering of visual content and temporal media. Inevitably the same creative stigmergic effect in the audiovisual domain from Internet-enabled collaboration will result in works of knowledge beyond our current imagination.

  It’s hard to predict exactly what they will be. But if you had asked me in 2000 whether something like Wikipedia was possible, I would have said, “Absolutely not!”

  We Know Less About Thinking Than We Think

  Steven R. Quartz

  Neuroscientist; associate professor of philosophy, Caltech; coauthor (with Terrence Sejnowski), Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are

  I don’t know how the Internet is changing the way I think, because I don’t know how I think. For that matter, I don’t think we know very much about how anyone thinks. Most likely our current best theories will end up relegated to the dustbin as not only wrong but misleading. Consider, for example, our tendency to reduce human thought to a few distinct processes. We’ve been doing this for a long time: Plato divided the mind into three parts, as did Freud. Today, many psychologists divide the mind into two (as Plato observed, you need at least two parts to account for mental conflict, as in that between reason and emotion). These dual-systems views distinguish between automatic and unconscious intuitive processes and slower and deliberative cognitive ones. This is appealing, but it suffers from considerable anomalies. Deliberative, reflective cognition has long been the normative standard for complex decision making—the subject of decision theory and microeconomics. Recent evidence, however, suggests that unconscious processes may actually be better at solving complex problems.

  Based on a misunderstanding of its capacity, our attention to normative deliberative decision making probably contributed to a lot of bad decision making. As attention turns increasingly to these unconscious, automatic processes, it is unlikely that they can be pigeonholed into a dual-systems view. Theoretical neuroscience offers an alternative model with three distinct systems—a Pavlovian system, a habit system, and a goal-directed system, each capable of behavioral control. Arguably, this provides a better understanding of human decision making: The habit system may guide us to our daily Starbucks fix (even if we no longer like their coffee), whereas the Pavlovian system may cause us to choose a pastry once we’re there, despite our goal of losing weight. But this model, too, probably severely underestimates the number of systems constituting thought. If a confederacy of systems constitutes thought, is the number closer to 4 or 400? I don’t think we have much basis today for answering one way or another.

  Consider also the tendency to treat thought as a logic system. The canonical model of cognitive science views thought as a process involving mental representations, and rules for manipulating those representations (a language of thought). These rules are typically thought of as a logic, which allows various inferences to be made and allows thought to be systematic (i.e., rational).

  Despite more than a half century of research on various logics (once constituting the entire field of non-monotonic logics), we still don’t know even the broad outlines of such a logic. Even if we did know more about its form, it would not apply to most thought processes. That is, most thought processes appear not to conform to cognitive science’s canonical view of thought. Instead, much of thought appears to rest on parallel, associative principles—all those currently categorized as automatic, unconscious ones, including probably most of vision, memory, learning, problem solving, and decision making. Here, neural network research, theoretical neuroscience, and contemporary machine learning provide suggestive early steps regarding these processes but remain rudimentary. The complex dynamics underlying nonpropositional forms of thought are still an essential mystery.

  We also know very little about how brain processes underlie thought. We do not understand the principles by which a single neuron integrates signals, nor even the “code” it uses to encode information and signal it to other neurons. We do not yet have the theoretical tools to understand how a billion of these cells interact to create complex thought. How such interactions create our inner mental life and give rise to the phenomenology of our experience (consciousness) is as much a fundamental mystery today as it was centuries ago.

  Finally, there is a troubling epistemological problem: In order to know whether the Internet is changing how I think, my introspection into my own thinking would have to be reliable. Too many clever psychology and brain-imaging experiments have made me suspicious of my own introspection. In place of the Cartesian notion that our mind is transparent to introspection, it is very likely that numerous biases undermine the possibility of self-knowledge, making our thinking as impermeable to ourselves as it is to others.

  An Impenetrable Machine

  Emily Pronin

  Associate professor of psychology, Princeton University

  A subject in a psychology experiment stands in a room with various objects strewn around the floor and two cords hanging from the ceiling. He is tasked with finding ways to tie the two cords together. The only problem is that they are far enough apart so that if he grabs one, he can’t reach the other. After devising some obvious solutions (such as lengthening one of the cords with an extension cord), the subject is stumped. Then the experimenter casually bumps into one of the cords,
causing it to swing to and fro. The subject suddenly has a new idea! He weights one of the cords and sets it swinging pendulum-style, then grabs the other cord and waits until the first one swings close enough to catch.

  Here’s something interesting about this experiment: Most of the subjects failed to recognize the experimenter’s role in leading them to this new idea. They believed that the thought of swinging the cord just dawned on them, or resulted from systematic analysis, or from consulting physics principles, or from images they conjured of monkeys swinging in trees. As this experiment and others like it (reviewed in a classic article by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson) illustrate, people are unaware of the particular influences that produce their thoughts.* We know what we think, but we don’t know why we think it. When a friend claims that it is her penchant for socialist ideals that leads her to support the latest health care reform bill, it might be wise for you to assume she likes the bill but to doubt her reasons why (and she ought to share your skepticism).

  This brings me to the question of how the Internet has changed the way I think. The problem is this: When it comes to my thoughts, I can honestly tell you what I think (about everything from mint-chip ice cream to e-mail; I love the former and am ambivalent about the latter), but I can only speculate as to why I think those things (does my love of mint-chip ice cream reflect its unique flavor or fond childhood memories of summer vacations with my parents before their divorce?). How has the Internet changed the way I think? I can’t really say, because I have no direct knowledge of what influences my thinking.

  The idea that my own mental processes are impenetrable to me is a tough one to swallow. It’s hard to accept the idea that at a basic level I don’t know what’s going on in my own head. At the same time, the idea has a certain obviousness to it: Of course I can’t recount the enormous complexity of biochemical processes and neural firing that gives rise to my thoughts. The typical neuron in my brain has thousands of synaptic connections to other neurons. Sound familiar?

  The Internet’s most popular search tool also feeds me thoughts (tangible ideas encoded in words) via a massively connected system that operates in a way that is hidden to me. The obscurity of Google’s inner workings (or the Net’s, more generally) makes its potential effect on my thoughts somewhat unnerving. My thinking may be influenced by unexpected search hits and extraneous words and images derived via a process beyond my comprehension and control. So although I have the feeling that it’s me driving the machine, perhaps it’s more the machine driving me. But wait—hasn’t that always been the case? Same process, different machine.

  A Question Without an Answer

  Tony Conrad

  Experimental filmmaker; musician/composer

  The Edge question is a question without an answer, like “When did you stop beating your husband?” It speaks across a divide that’s transparent in language but not in social structuring. Even if you decide to disagree with the late Niklas Luhmann, he was the clearest spokesperson on this point when he wrote: “Systems of the mind and systems of communication exist completely independently of each other . . . however, they form a relationship of structural complementarity,” and “The independence of each closed system is a requirement for structural complementarity, that is, for the reciprocal initiation (but not determination) of the actualized choice of structure.”

  What are we trying to deal with here? The question itself—“How is the Internet changing the way you think?”—intimates that the Internet has in some sense materially infected the structure of (inter)subjectivity, that language itself (that is, our common consciousness and unconscious), in the context of global Internet communications, is altered or somehow functions differently. But in the sense that language is our shared thinking, there is no way the Internet might change only the way “you” think or “I” think. This “thinking” is a mediated collectivity that functions meaningfully not as “you” or “I” but as “we.” The question can only be “How is the Internet changing the way we think?”

  Talk around it, don’t answer; it’s that riddle whose answer is not to be answered.

  The Internet has sapped my illocutionary force. Even before the Internet, various communication channels represented radically differentiated registers of illocutionary force; for instance, I could write words I wouldn’t use carelessly in civil society. The distance and anonymity of the Internet abets radical illocutionary shifts in language resources. This restaging of modes of address at all levels has impinged especially effectively on me as a culture worker who engages in interpersonal confrontations at various ranges of effective distances between me and the subject.

  Internet communication is intimate. Internet activity is usually—almost always—individual, a confrontation between the solo subject and the interface with Everything. Sitting alone at my laptop, I’m shrouded in an enveloping trance, a shaped direction; the Internet is intimate, comes in very close, takes up a station nearly inside the sensorium, internal to the subject and somehow exempting the noumenal world, in a way that is quite privileged. Just as a good novel shares its style of thinking, its language and outlook, with me, the Internet also gets internalized to a great degree. Aha! But then, along with this surface—the “neutral” screen surface that carries this or that here or there—comes a fluid of advertising structures. This also happens in magazines and TV, but their surfaces are far less fluid, the distances between information strategies and attentional manipulation far greater, more explicit.

  How is the Internet changing the way you (or I) think? What thinking? Is this intended to focus our attention on focused attention? In short, on trance? “Flow”? Focus? Attention? For me, these areas are guided by unconscious processes (which is what advertisers count on): skeins of desires, memory constructs, social links, affiliations, and associations, bundled in carefully culturally regulated assemblages. I become aware that many tools of advertising are formal correlates of classic trance induction rituals, which in turn are closely paralleled by conceptual and formal art strategies. The trance induction procedure that disrupts focused thinking by counting backward could serve as a conceptual or formal art piece. So could the disruptive spellings of advertising—kool, E-Z, kleen, et cetera—that similarly disrupt focused thinking. The intrusion of advertising onto the Internet hasn’t been simply additive; it is multiplicative. Advertising communication modulates my attentional systems; that’s its aim. As an artist, I become aware that the function of these formal structures and devices is the command and control of my attention.

  In the matrix of intersections among globalization, new media, and jurisprudence are unoccupied spaces tricksters should locate and occupy. What kind of social role does this thinking suggest? Twenty years ago, I proposed that media artists should try to break laws that had not yet been written—or, as I put it in a public address at the time, instead of impotent and fitful gestures to service and educate “the community,” the need is really (1) to find creative engagements with the law, to set instrumental moral examples for the new home camcorder user, and (2) to invent new crimes.

  Not only artists and outsiders but I and everyone else on the Internet have become “criminalized.” In a city, anonymity invites both opportunistic and planned criminality, because there are far fewer chances of being recognized than in a village. Online, my identity is a security negotiation, as at airports and banks. But airports and banks are institutions, isolated from home, whereas the Internet is intimate.

  The fact that I can shop at home means that I can steal and be stolen from at home, too. The pervasive capacity for deception that the Internet embodies is directly coupled to intimacy—not only the intimacy of circumstantial space, such as the home, but intimacies of the imaginary: sexual desires, secret wishes, possessiveness and power dreams, hunger and fatigue, ill health and the threat of death. These are Big Things; they bulldoze fears of criminality aside and open the gates to criminal thoughts, on one hand, and victimization, on the other. These “thoughts�
�� are not so much coherent plans as mindsets—a general drift or modality of moral outlook—and this sea change of outlook has made for adjustments in my language, expectations, social commerce, vigilance, and levels of depression or exhilaration, in a proliferating tangle of ways.

  By delocalizing, rapidly substituting communications for travel (or perhaps creating a convergence between these two systems), the Internet has transposed the global socioeconomic North/South vector into a socially vertical vector, as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” These vectors—North/South and rich/poor—may not commonly be perceived as globally equivalent, but neocolonialism does equal the globalization of wage slavery accompanied by huge bonuses among financial managers, with the larger effect of class structure rigidification and the global assurance of corporate hegemony.

  The Internet, which has been the vehicle for this 90-degree shift, comprises also the vehicle for stabilization of the new order, since it is the convergence site for every channel of mass communications. But if everyone has free access to information sources, won’t these social disparities be resolved through agonistic processes of one sort or another? Or is it instead possible that the opposition movement will merely sustain a quasi-stable dialectical balance? These are Internet “thoughts” that daily bring me pain.

  Analytical understanding doesn’t resolve conflicts. In fact, the resolution of social disparities is being addressed more trenchantly today by religious fervor than by academic analysis, so the control of belief systems by the Internet, and its evolving strategies for adjusting our minds, represents the balance of future power. Is this at work on me? Likely so. As it happens, belief, conviction, and knowledge are language structures dangling in the language breeze—a breeze inflected, regulated, and abetted by formal processes that attract me: repetition, metaphorical displacement, tradition and ritual, iconic simplification, bait and switch and other psychological tricks (“You can’t have any spinach!” “No! I want spinach!”), and framing or setting apart.