Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  I suspect I am not the sole victim of Internet-induced present-self bias. Indeed, Web-based future-self prostheses have begun to emerge, including software that tracks time off task and intervenes, ranging from posting reminders through blocking access and even shutting programs down. Watching my own and others’ struggles between present self and future self, I worry that the Internet may impose a “survival of the focused,” in which individuals gifted with some natural ability to stay on target, or who are hopped up on enough stimulants, forge ahead while the rest of us flail helplessly in a Web-based attentional vortex. All of this makes me wonder whether I can trust my selves on the Internet. Or do I need to take more draconian measures—for instance, leaving my computer at home, chaining myself to a coffeehouse table, and drafting in longhand?

  I Am Realizing How Nice People Can Be

  Paul Bloom

  Psychologist, Yale University; author, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

  When I was a boy, I loved the science fiction idea of a machine that could answer any factual question. It might be a friendly robot, or a metal box you keep in your house, or one of the components of a starship. You would just ask, “Computer, how far away is Mars?” or “Computer, list the American presidents in order of height,” and a toneless voice would immediately respond.

  I own several such machines right now, including an iPhone that fits in my pocket; all of them access information on the Internet. (Disappointingly, I can’t actually talk to any of them—the science fiction writers were optimistic in this regard.) But the big surprise is that much of this information is not compiled by corporations, governments, or universities. It comes from volunteers. Wikipedia is the best-known example, with millions of articles created by millions of volunteer editors, but there are also popular sites such as Amazon.com and TripAdvisor.com that contain countless unpaid and anonymous reviews.

  People have wondered whether this information is accurate (answer: mostly yes), but I’m more interested in its very existence. I am not surprised by the scammers, the self-promoters, and the haters. But why do people devote their time and energy to anonymously donating accurate and useful information? We don’t put $20 bills in strangers’ mailboxes; why are we giving them our time and expertise? Comments on blogs pose a similar puzzle, something nicely summarized in the classic xkcd cartoon in which someone is typing frantically on the computer; when asked to come to bed, the person says, “I can’t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.”

  Apparently the Internet evokes the same social impulses that arise in face-to-face interactions. If someone is lost and asks you for directions, you are unlikely to refuse or to lie. It is natural, in most real-world social contexts, to offer an opinion about a book or movie you like or to speak up when the topic is something you know a lot about. The proffering of information on the Internet is the extension of this everyday altruism. It illustrates the extent of human generosity in our everyday lives and also shows how technology can enhance and expand this positive human trait, with real beneficial results. People have long said that the Web makes us smarter; it might make us nicer as well.

  My Perception of Time

  Marina Abramović

  Artist

  Since I started using the Internet and all the options it offers in matters of communication, my perception of global time has changed radically.

  I’m now much more aware of time differences, and, in a restless way, my nights are haunted by the presence of the other working days all around the world.

  I’ve become obsessed with being constantly up to date on my correspondence, and I’ve lost that no-man’s-land that was the time it took for a letter to arrive at its destination, be answered, and travel all the way back to me.

  My days become nights, and my nights become brighter and more “available.”

  Ever since I understood this trap, I have been trying to fight back, to take back control of my time, but it’s hard to do, especially when my perception of time itself has altered.

  The Rotating Problem, or How I Learned to Accelerate My Mental Clock

  Stanislas Dehaene

  Neuroscientist, Collège de France, Paris; author, Reading in the Brain

  Like the Gutenberg press in its time, the Internet is revolutionizing our access to knowledge and the world we live in. Few people, however, pay attention to a fundamental aspect of this change: the shift in our notion of time. Human life used to be organized in inflexible day-and-night cycles—a quiet routine that has become radically disrupted, for good or ill.

  Some years ago, I was working out of Paris with colleagues in Harvard on the mathematical mind of Amazon Indians. The project was so exciting, and we were so motivated by the paper we were writing, that we worked on it every day, if not day and night (we had families and friends . . .).

  At the end of each day, I would send my colleagues a new draft of our article, full of detailed questions and issues that needed to be addressed. In a world without the Internet, I would have had to wait several weeks for a reply. Not so in today’s world. Every morning, after a good night’s sleep, I woke up to find that most of my questions had been answered during the night, as if by magic. The experience reminded me of the mysterious instances of unconscious problem solving during sleep, as famously reported by Kekulé, Poincaré, Hadamard, and other mathematicians and scientists. The difference, of course, was that my problems were solved thanks to conscious effort and the pooling of several minds around the planet.

  For my Harvard colleagues, too, the experience seemed somewhat miraculous. They, too, had many questions, and I dutifully computed the statistics they requested, drew the new data plots they asked for, and wrote the paragraphs they needed—all this while Harvard was still plunged in night. Thanks to this collective effort, our work was completed much faster than any one of us could have managed alone. We had almost doubled the speed of our mental clocks!

  The idea is now commonplace. A great many companies outsource translation or maintenance to Indian, Australian, or Taiwanese employees on the other side of the world so that the work can be completed overnight. However, the scope of this phenomenon does not appear to have fully dawned on us yet.

  For example, imagine an international corporation—say, a movie studio, such as Pixar—intentionally placing three of its computing centers at the vertices of a giant equilateral triangle spanning the earth, so that the employees at a given location can work on a project for eight daylight hours and then pass it on to another team in a different time zone.

  For a more grandiose picture, one that could have arisen from the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, imagine a complex Problem that moves around the planet via the Internet, at a fixed speed precisely countering the Earth’s rotation, in such a way that the Problem constantly faces the sun. As dawn comes for a fraction of humanity, the Problem is present on their computer screens—but some of it has been chipped away by armies of fellow workers who, by this time, are sound asleep. Day and night, without interruption, the Earth’s rotation cranks away at the Problem until it is solved.

  Such giant utopian or Borgesian projects do in fact already exist: Wikipedia, Linux, SourceForge, OLPC (One Laptop per Child). They are beyond the scope, or even the imagination, of any single human being. Nowadays open-source development moves around in the infosphere and is being improved constantly on whatever side of the planet happens to be in sunshine (and often on the other side as well).

  There is grandeur in this new way of computer life, where the normal sleep-wake cycle is replaced by the constant churning of silicon and mind. But there is much inherent danger in it as well. Take a look at Amazon’s aptly named Mechanical Turk, and you’ll find an alternative Website where largely profitable enterprises in developed countries offer short-term, badly paid computer jobs to the third world’s poor. For a few pennies, they propose a number of thankless assignments ironically called “human intelligence tasks” that require completing for
ms, categorizing images, or typing handwritten notes—anything computers still cannot do. They provide no benefits, no contract, no guarantees, and ask no questions: the dark side of the intellectual globalization now made possible by the Internet.

  As our mental clocks keep accelerating and we become increasingly impatient about our unfinished work, the Internet provides our society with a choice that deserves reflection: Do we aim for ever faster intellectual collaboration or for ever faster exploitation that will allow us to get a good night’s sleep while others do the dirty work? With the Internet, a new sense of time is dawning, but our basic political options remain essentially unchanged.

  I Must Confess to Being Perplexed

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; author, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

  Answering this question should be a slam dunk, right? After all, thinking about thinking is my racket. Yet I must confess to being perplexed. I am not even sure we have good evidence that the way humans think has been changed by the advent of the printing press. . . . Of course, the speed of accessing information and the extent of information at one’s fingertips have been increased enormously, but has that actually affected the way thinking unfolds?

  Relying on my personal experience, I would suggest the following hypotheses:

  1. I’m less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet to either check existing databases or ask a colleague directly. (Result: less sustained thought?)

  2. Information from the Internet is often decontextualized, but, being quickly acquired, it satisfies immediate needs at the expense of deeper understanding. (Result: more superficial thought?)

  3. At the same time, connection between ideas, facts, et cetera, can be more easily established on the Web—if one takes the time to do so. (Result: more intrapersonally integrated thought?)

  4. The development of cooperative sites, ranging from Wikipedia to open-source software (and including Edge?), makes the thought process more public, more interactive, more transpersonal, resulting in something similar to what Teilhard de Chardin anticipated over half a century ago as the noosphere, a global consciousness he saw as the next step in human evolution.

  Like all technologies, this one has both positive and negative consequences. I’m not sure I’d bet on the first two (negative) hypotheses being closer to the truth—or on the next two, which are more positive. And of course, both sets could be true at the same time.

  Taking on the Habits of the Scientist, the Investigative Reporter, and the Media Critic

  Yochai Benkler

  Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; codirector, Berkman Center for Internet and Society; author, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

  Answering this question requires us to know what you mean by “the Internet” and what you mean by “the way you think.” If by “the way you think,” you mean “the way your brain functions when you are doing certain kinds of operations,” I am provisionally prepared to answer, “Not at all.” Provisionally, because it is not entirely clear to me that this is true.

  I will answer the question as though it were phrased, instead, as “How has the Internet changed the way you come to form and revise beliefs?”—beliefs about the state of the world (for example, that the globe is warming due to human action) or the state of a social claim (whether or not a blue shirt goes with black pants, or whether it is immoral to enforce patents on medicines in ways that result in prices too high for distribution in Africa, where millions of people die each year from preventable diseases while manufacturers of generics stand ready to make those drugs affordable).

  This leads us to the first question: What do you mean by “the Internet”? By “Internet” I, at least, mean a sociocultural condition in which we are more readily and seamlessly connected to more people, with varying degrees of closeness and remoteness; to more social and organizational structures, both those we belong to and those we don’t; and to more cultural artifacts and knowledge-embedded objects.

  An e-mail with an inchoate thought, half a fragment to a friend, is the kind of thing I can do today with more people than those with whom I can readily grab a cup of coffee; I can also do it with people whose friendship I value but who are geographically remote. Social distance has moderated as well. Sending an e-mail to a stranger who stands in an organizational, institutional, or socially proximate role is slightly easier and considered less intrusive than making a phone call used to be.

  Most radical is the recognition that someone, somewhere, entirely remote in geographic, social, or organizational terms, has thought about something similar or pertinent. Existing as we do in a context that captures the transcript of so many of our conversations—from Wikipedia to blogs—makes the conversations of others about questions we are thinking about vastly more readable to us than was true in the past.

  If by “the way I think” we evoke Descartes’ cogito, the self- referential “I think,” then all we would think of with regard to the Internet is information search and memory enhancement. But if we understand thought as a much more dialogic and dialectic process—if “I think” entails “I am in conversation”—then the Internet probably does change how I think, quite a bit. No, it doesn’t mean that “everyone is connected to everyone else” and we all exist in a constant stream of babble. But it does mean that we can talk to one another in serially expanding circles of social, geographic, and organizational remoteness, and that we can listen to others’ conversations, and learn.

  Thinking with these new capabilities requires both a new kind of open-mindedness and a new kind of skepticism. Open- mindedness, because it is increasingly turning out that knowledge and insight reside in many more places than we historically recognized. A sixteen-year-old Norwegian kid might solve the question of how to crack the DVD scrambling system. A ski lift operator and shoe salesman from Minnesota who happens to be a political junkie and hangs out on Daily Kos may have more insights into the dynamics of the Minnesota Senate election recount than the experts at CNN or the New York Times.

  But there is also plenty of nonsense. We all know this. And so alongside the open-mindedness, we have come to develop a healthy dose of skepticism—both about those who are institutionally anointed experts and about those who are institutional outsiders. Belief formation and revision is an open and skeptical conversation: searching for interlocutors, forming provisional beliefs, giving them weight, continually updating. We cannot seek authority, only partial degrees of provisional confidence. We have to take on the habits of the scientist, the investigative reporter, and the media critic as an integral part of the normal flow of life, learning, and understanding.

  Maybe that’s how I’ve always been. Maybe it has nothing to do with the Internet.

  Thinking as Therapy in a World of Too Much

  Ernst Pöppel

  Psychologist and neuroscientist; director emeritus, Institute for Medical Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; author, Mindworks: Time and Conscious Experience

  It is painful to admit, but I had never thought about thinking before the Internet. With a prescientific attitude, I had (and most of the time still have) the impression that “I” do not think at all, but that “it thinks,” sometimes resulting in what appears to be a solution or an insight but usually ending in nowhere. Apparently I am at the mercy of uncontrolled and uncontrollable processes, presumably in my brain, but before the Internet I never cared about these processes themselves.

  This is how I experience this “proto-thinking”: It is like swimming in an ocean with no visible horizon, where sometimes an island surfaces unexpectedly, indicating a direction, but before I reach this island it has disappeared again. This feeling of being at a loss has become much stronger with the Internet. There is no direction, there are no islands—and this can no longer be accepted. What can I do,
swimming in this ocean of information, in a world of too much? Maybe it is useful to think about thinking—as others such as John Brockman have done successfully, which then enables them to ask a question about thinking and the Internet. Maybe it is helpful to think about thinking as a therapy to combat loss of cognitive control—to fight against the “too much” that results in “too little.” The goal must be to create a personal framework for orientation in the world of too much, by asking questions such as “What is thinking?” or “Why is there thinking?”

  These are my personal answers, presumably shared by many others. Why is there thinking? From a biological point of view (and can there be any other?), thinking is a service function of our brain to create a homeostatic state, an internal equilibrium. Of course, thinking is not the only service function; this is also true of perception, emotional evaluation, and working memory. But those functions are characterized by a rather short time horizon. To expand this horizon, thinking arrived in our evolution; thus, virtual behavior has become possible. Goal-oriented thinking allows the anticipation of a successful action and creates freedom in behavioral control such that the organism no longer has to react instantaneously. The option space of potential successful actions to reach a homeostatic state is considerably enlarged.

  Next question: What is thinking? For successful Probehandeln (as Sigmund Freud referred to thinking), the letter C may serve to remind us of the different operations.

  Thinking is necessarily defined within a context, or frame. Without context, I navigate the Internet without any orientation, hoping to find a jewel by harvesting serendipity (which, indeed, sometimes happens).