Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  Thinking requires material for thinking operations. That is, without a mental category, there would be no thinking. Thinking must be about something, clearly and distinctly defined, as René Descartes asked for in his first rule of thinking in the Discours de la méthode. But one category is not sufficient.

  Thinking requires several categories in order to allow comparison, which is, according to Rudolf Carnap, the most basic mental operation. Comparing is possible with respect to quantity or to quality. That is, different categories can be more or less, or “this versus that,” and the result of a comparison allows choice, which is the basis of decision and then of action.

  The process of categorizing, comparing, and choosing must follow a correct temporal order or sequence, which only then allows the extraction of causality, based on the proper continuity of mental operations. But how do I know whether thinking has brought me to the right answer?

  The constellation of the different operations, and the answer gained by thinking about a question, has to fit into the landscape of previous thinking and what is considered to be true. This may be signaled by what Archimedes experienced as “Eureka!” This experience is more than an analytical appreciation; it results in a feeling of satisfaction that indeed the anticipated goal in virtual space has been reached.

  Certainly I never would have thought about the seven C’s as elements of thinking if I hadn’t been lost in the world of too much. Thus, thinking has become a necessary therapy.

  internet is wind

  Stefano Boeri

  Architect, Politecnico of Milan; visiting professor, Harvard University Graduate School of Design; editor-in-chief, Abitare magazine

  internet is wind.

  a constant—and dominant—wind that unsettles and swathes us.

  in recent years we have become familiar with walking by displacing our weight, our equilibrium, in an opposite direction to this wind.

  only in this manner are we able to walk straight, without succumbing, without completely folding to its logic of simultaneous and globalized reciprocity. but it is enough to unplug the connection, turn the corner, find shelter, place oneself leeward, and internet disappears.

  leaving us unbalanced, for a moment, folded in the direction of the wind, because of the inertia of the effort of resistance we have made until that moment.

  and yet, at that moment, the effort seems a formidable resource.

  suddenly we are in front of what is not said; of that which we cannot and will not ever communicate of our own interior, of our personal idiosyncrasies, of our distorted individuality.

  thought in the era of internet has this uniqueness:

  there, the space-time we are able to protect from this wind becomes precious occasions to understand what we cannot say, what we are not willing to deposit in the forum of planetary simultaneity.

  so as to understand what we really are.

  Of Knowledge, Content, Place, and Space

  Galia Solomonoff

  Architect, Solomonoff Architecture Studio

  The Internet is fundamentally altering the relationship between knowledge, content, place, and space. Consider the world as di- vided into two similarly populous halves: people born before 1980 and people born after 1980. Of course, there are other important differences, such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, and geography, yet I see 1980 as significant in the shift and alteration in the relationship of knowledge, place, and space—because of the use of the Internet. Three examples/scenes:

  Example/Scene 1

  I am responding to the Edge question from Funes, a locality of 15,000 inhabitants in the middle of the Argentine Pampas. I am in a locutorio with eight fully equipped computers that charges the equivalent of twenty cents for fifteen minutes of Internet use. Five other users are here: a woman in her twenties talking via Skype to her sister and niece in Spain, a thirtysomething man in shirt and tie scanning a résumé, two teens playing a video game with what I guess is a multiplaced or nonplaced community, and a man posting photos of a baby and a trip on a Facebook page. And there’s me, a forty-two-year-old architect on vacation, with an assignment due in two hours!

  I am the oldest here. I am also the only nonlocal. The computer helps me and corrects my spelling without being prompted.

  Example/Scene 2

  Years ago, when I was an architecture student and wanted to know about, say, Guarino Guarini’s importance as an architect, I would go two flights down at Avery Library, get a few index cards, follow the numbered instructions on them, and find two or four or seven feet of books on a shelf dedicated to the subject. Then I would look at a few cross-referenced words on those cards, such as “Mannerist architecture,” go down another aisle in the same room, and identify another few feet of books. I would leaf through all the found books and get a vague yet physical sense of how much there was to know about the subject matter.

  Now I Google “Guarino Guarini” and in 0.29 seconds I get 153,000 entries. The first page reveals basic details of his life: He was born on January 7, 1624, and lived until March 6, 1683. I also get six images of cupolas, a Wikipedia entry, and an Encyclopaedia Britannica entry. My Google search is very detailed, yet not at all physical. I can’t tell how much I like this person’s personality or work. I can’t decide whether or not I want to flip through more entries.

  Example/Scene 3

  I am in a car traveling from New York to Philadelphia. I have GPS but no maps. The GPS tells me where to go and takes into account traffic and tolls. I trust the GPS, yet in my memory I wish to reconstruct a New York–Philadelphia trip I took years ago. On that other trip, I had a map, I entered the city from a bridge, the foreground was industrial and decrepit, the background was vertical and contemporary . . . At least, that is what I remember. Was it so? I zoom out the GPS to see if the GPS map reveals an alternative entry route, a different way the city geography could be approached. Nothing in the GPS map looks like the space I remember. What happened? Is my memory of the place faulty, or is the focus of the GPS too narrow?

  What I want to convey with these examples/scenes is how, over time and with the advent of the Internet, our sense of orientation, space, and place has changed, along with our sense of the details necessary to make decisions. If decisions take into account the many ways in which information comes to us, then the Internet at this point privileges what we can see and read over many other aspects of knowledge and sensation, such as how much something weighs, how it feels, how stable it is. Are we, the ones who knew places before the Internet, more able to navigate them now, or less? Do we make better or worse decisions based on the content we take in? Do we have longer, better sojourns in faraway places or constant placelessness? How have image, space, place, and content been altered to give us a sense of here and now?

  The Power of Conversation

  Gloria Origgi

  Philosopher, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris

  I spend more than half my working hours doing e-mail. I have 4,407 messages in my Gmail inbox today—stuff that I haven’t read yet, that I have to reply to, or that I keep in the inbox just so I can take advantage of the search function and retrieve it when needed.

  Each time I find myself late in the afternoon still writing messages to friends, colleagues, perfect strangers, students, et cetera, I feel guilty at having wasted my day, shirked my intellectual responsibility. These psychological reactions can be harsh to the point of forcing me to inflict various forms of punishment on myself, such as imprisonment in a dusty Parisian library without Internet connection or switching off the modem at home. That is because I believe that my work is not writing e-mails; rather, it is writing papers and learned essays on philosophy and related issues.

  But what is philosophy? What is academic work in general, at least in the humanities? One of my mentors once told me that being an academic just means being part of a conversation—that’s it. Plato used the dialog as a form of expression, to render in a more vivid way the dialectic process of thinking, to construct k
nowledge from open verbal confrontation. One of the books that influenced me most during my undergraduate philosophical studies in Italy was Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. I have read on the Edge site that Edge is a conversation. So—what is so bad about the e-mail conversations invading my life? What is the big difference between contemplating the first blank page of a new paper and the excited exchange through Gmail or Skype with a colleague in another part of the world?

  My intellectual life started to improve when I realized there isn’t that much difference—that academic papers, comments on papers, reviews, replies, et cetera, are conversations in slow motion. I write a paper for an academic journal; the paper is evaluated by other philosophers, who suggest improvements; it is then disseminated to the academic community to prompt new conversations on a topic or launch new topics for discussion. Those are the rules of the game. And if I make an introspective effort to visualize my way of thinking, I realize I am never alone in my mind: A number of more or less invited guests are sitting around somewhere in my brain, challenging me when I overconfidently claim this or that.

  Arguing is a basic ingredient of thinking: Our ways of structuring thought would have been very different without the powerful tool of verbal exchange. So let’s admit that the Internet allows us to think and write in a way much more natural than the one imposed by the traditional culture of the written word. The dialogical dimension of our thinking is now enhanced by continual fluid exchanges with others.

  The way to stop feeling guilty about wasting our time is to commit ourselves to interesting and well-articulated conversations—just as we accept invitations to dinners where we hope the talk will be stimulating and we won’t fall asleep after the second glass of wine. I run a Website that keeps track of high-level learned conversations between academics. I find that each medium produces its wastes; for example, most books are just noise that disappears a few months after publication. I don’t think we should concentrate on the wastes; rather, we should make responsible use of our conversational skills and free ourselves from unreal commitments to accidental formats, such as books or academic papers—formats that owe their authority to the central role they played in our education.

  If what we leave to the next generation are threads of useful and learned conversations, then so be it. I see this as an improvement in our way of externalizing our thinking—a much more natural way of being intelligent in a social world.

  A Real-Time Perpetual Time Capsule

  Nick Bilton

  Adjunct professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University; lead technology writer, Bits blog, the New York Times; author, I’m from the Future and Here’s How It Works.

  The Internet has become a real-time perpetual time capsule. A bottomless invisible urn. A storage locker for every moment of our lives, and a place to allow anyone to dip in and retrieve those memories.

  The Internet has killed the private diary hiding under my sister’s mattress and replaced it with a blog or social network.

  Through the social sharing Web, we have become an opt- everything society: sharing our feelings in status updates, uploading digital pictures of everything—good or otherwise. We discuss what we’re reading or watching and offer brutally honest critiques. We tweet the birth of a child or announce an engagement. And we are completely unaware of the viewers we talk with. I suspect we don’t even care. (I know I don’t.) We are all just part of an infinite conversation.

  And no one stands above anyone else. The Internet gives each of us a bullhorn and allows us to use it freely, whenever we see fit, to say whatever we want. In the past, bullhorns were expensive, as were printing presses, television studios, or radio stations. To reach large audiences required deep pockets. But now we are all capable of distributing our voices, opinions, and thoughts evenly. When everyone has a bullhorn, no one individual can shout louder than the others; instead, it just becomes a really loud conversation.

  Most important, the Web allows for an equilibrium of chatter. People use the same services to share and consume their vastly divergent views and interests.

  The Web is capable of spreading information more quickly than any virus known to man, and it’s impossible to stop. Without these confabulations, the Web would be an empty wasteland of one-sided conversation, just as newspapers, television programs, and radio stations used to be.

  The Internet has changed the way we think, through numerous channels. But it has changed the way I think through one very simple action: Every important moment of my life is documented, cataloged, and sent online to be shared and eulogized with whoever wants to engage in the conversation.

  Getting from Jack Kerouac to the Pentatonic Scale

  Jesse Dylan

  Filmmaker; founder, FreeForm production company; founder, the medical Website Lybba.org

  The promise of the Web, when it was first kicked around at CERN and DARPA, was to create a decentralized exchange of information. The grand power of that idea is that insight can come from anywhere. People with differing ideas and backgrounds can test their theories against the world, and may the best idea win. The fact that the information can be looked at by so many different kinds of people from anywhere on Earth is the Internet’s true power—and the source of my fascination with it. Right now, a little kid can browse the raw data coming from the Large Hadron Collider; he can search the stars for signals of alien life with the SETI project. Anyone can discover the next world-changing breakthrough. That’s the point of the Internet.

  Also, the contribution of search engines in simplifying the research process can’t be underestimated. This enables us to conduct research instantly, on our own terms. That’s a tremendous leap from what I had to do ten years ago to find anything out—from knowing who my interview subjects are to where I can get the best BLT in Hollywood—and the Web is still in its infancy. The great hubs of information we’ve constructed, and the tools to traverse them, such as Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook, are only going to get deeper and more resonant as we learn how to communicate over them more effectively. Just think about what we can do when these tools are applied to the worlds of medicine, science, and art. I can’t wait to see what a world full of instant knowledge and open inquiry will bring.

  Today, the Internet permeates pretty much all of my thoughts and actions. I access it with my phone, my computer, at home, at work. It gives me untold quantities of new knowledge and inspiration. I interact with people all over the world from different fields and walks of life, and I see myself and others becoming interconnected hubs of information that the full range of human experience passes through. I feel that I am never truly alone, with the ends of the Earth a few clicks away.

  I once discussed with the late mathematician George Whitehead the way to approach innovation. Almost as an aside, he said that the only way to make advances was to have five different strategies, in the hope that one of them would work out. Well, the Internet is a place where I can pick from the sum of all the strategies people have already tried out, and if I think of something new, I can put it up there to share with the world.

  I was at the Mayo Clinic doing a film project on a rare condition called neuromyelitis optica (NMO, aka Devic’s disease or Devic’s syndrome). I heard about how the diagnostic test for this condition was discovered. A specialist on multiple sclerosis was speaking at a symposium, and a cancer researcher heard his results. This accident led to the creation of the test. To me, though, it’s not an accident at all. It happened because someone—maybe the Mayo brothers themselves—put in place a system, making the symposium an event that disparate researchers and physicians would attend. The insight came because the platform made it possible for these people and ideas to come together, and that made possible a better level of understanding, and so on and so forth.

  When I was a child, I learned from looking at the world and reading books. The knowledge I craved was hidden away. Much was secret and unavailable. You had to dig deep to find what
you were looking for, and often what you wanted was locked up and out of reach. To get from Jack Kerouac to Hank Williams to the pentatonic scale used to be quite a journey. Now, it can happen in an instant. Some people would say that the old way was a good thing. I disagree.

  A Vehicle for Large-Scale Education About the Human Mind

  Mahzarin R. Banaji

  Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

  My first encounter with the information highway came in the form of a love letter in 1982. My boyfriend had studied artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon in the mid-1970s and worked at an IBM lab on the East Coast while I was in graduate school in the Midwest. He had pestered me to get an account on something called BITNET. After procrastinating, because I didn’t see the point of it, there I was, connected to him without paying AT&T a penny. So that’s what the Net is good for, I thought, and recommended it wholeheartedly to every couple struggling to manage a long-distance relationship.

  Almost thirty years later, I cannot say that the Internet has changed, even an iota, how I think. But what the Internet has surely done is to change what I think about, what I know, and what I do. It has done so in stupendous ways, and I mention the single most significant one.

  In the mid-1990s, I began working on a method for gaining access to the way in which the mind works automatically, unreflectively, less consciously. My students and I studied how thoughts and feelings about social groups (race, gender, class, age, and so on)—feelings we might consider unacceptable—nevertheless came to have a presence in our minds. This situation, we recognized, didn’t result from simple obtuseness on the part of human beings; it was the mind’s nature. Remarkably, I could test myself, and I learned that my own mind contained thoughts and feelings of which I was unaware, that those thoughts and feelings weren’t ones I wanted to possess or was proud of, yet much as I might deny them, they were a part of who I was.