I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much information. I don’t believe Google makes us dumber, or that prolonged Internet fasts or a return to faxes is a necessary part of mind health. But data without the ability to divine is useless. I don’t trust algorithm the way I trust intuition: the art of dowsing through data. Once, wisdom was measured by memory, by the capacity for storage and processing and retrieving on demand. But we have tools for that now. We made machines that became shared extensions of mind. How will we define wisdom now? I don’t know, but I can ask.
Bleat for Yourself
Larry Sanger
Cofounder of Wikipedia and Citizendium
The instant availability of an ocean of information has been an epoch-making boon to humanity. But has the resulting information overload also deeply changed how we think? Has it changed the nature of the self ? Has it even—as some have suggested—radically altered the relationship of the individual and society? These are important philosophical questions, but vague and slippery, and I hope to clarify them.
The Internet is changing how we think, it is suggested. But how is it, precisely? One central feature of the “new mind” is that it is spread too thin. But what does that mean?
In functional terms, being spread too thin means we have too many Websites to visit, we get too many messages, and too much is “happening” online (and in other media) that we feel compelled to take on board. Many of us lack effective strategies for organizing our time in the face of this onslaught. This makes us constantly distracted, unfocused, and less able to perform heavy intellectual tasks. Among other things, or so some have confessed, we cannot focus long enough to read whole books. We feel unmoored, and we flow along helplessly wherever the fast-moving digital flood carries us.
We do? Well—some of us do, evidently.
Some observers speak of “where we are going” or of how “our minds” are being changed by information overload, apparently despite ourselves. Their discussions make erstwhile free agents mere subjects of powerful new forces, and the only question is where those forces are taking us. I don’t share the assumption here. When I saw the title of Nick Carr’s essay in the Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I immediately thought, “Speak for yourself.” Discussions such as Carr’s assume that intellectual control has already been ceded—but that strikes me as being a cause, not a symptom, of the problem Carr bemoans. After all, the exercise of freedom requires focus and attention, and the ur-event of the will is precisely focus itself. Carr unwittingly confessed what is for too many of us a moral failing, a vice; the old name for it is intemperance (in the older, broader sense, contrasted with sophrosyne, moderation or self-control). And, as with so much of vice, we want to blame it on anything but ourselves.
Is it really true that we no longer have any choice but to be intemperate in how we spend our time, in the face of the temptations and shrill demands of networked digital media? New media are not that powerful. We still retain free will, which is the ability to focus, deliberate, and act on the results of our deliberations. If we want to spend hours reading books, we still possess that freedom. Only philosophical argument could establish that information overload has deprived us of our agency; the claim, at root, is philosophical, not empirical.
My interlocutors might cleverly reply that in the age of Facebook and Wikipedia we do still deliberate, but collectively. In other words, for example, we vote stuff up or down on Digg, del.icio.us, and Slashdot, and then we might feel ourselves obligated—if we’re participating as true believers—to pay special attention to the top-voted items. Similarly, we attempt to reach “consensus” on Wikipedia, and—again, if participating as true believers—we endorse the end result as credible. To the extent that our time is thus directed by social networks engaged in collective deliberation, we are subjugated to a “collective will,” something like Rousseau’s notion of a general will. To the extent that we plug in, we become merely another part of the network. That, anyway, is how I would reconstruct the collectivist-determinist position opposed to my own individualist-libertarian one.
But we obviously have the freedom not to participate in such networks. And we have the freedom to consume the output of such networks selectively and while holding our noses—to participate, we needn’t be true believers. So it is very hard for me to take the “Woe is us, we’re growing stupid and collectivized like sheep” narrative seriously. If you feel yourself growing ovine, bleat for yourself.
I get the sense that many writers on these issues aren’t much bothered by the unfocusing, de-liberating effects of joining the hive mind. Don Tapscott has suggested that the instant availability of information means we don’t have to memorize anything anymore—just consult Google and Wikipedia, the brains of the hive mind. Clay Shirky seems to believe that in the future we will be enculturated not by reading dusty old books but in something like online fora, plugged into the ephemera of a group mind, as it were. But surely, if we were to act as either of these college teachers recommend, we’d become a bunch of ignoramuses. Indeed, perhaps that’s what social networks are turning too many kids into, as Mark Bauerlein argues cogently in The Dumbest Generation. (For the record, I’ve started homeschooling my own little boy.)
The issues here are much older than the Internet. They echo the debate between progressivism and traditionalism found in the philosophy of education: Should children be educated primarily so as to fit in well in society, or should the focus be on training minds for critical thinking and filling them with knowledge? For many decades before the advent of the Internet, educational progressivists have insisted that in our rapidly changing world knowing mere facts is not what is important, because knowledge quickly becomes outdated; rather, being able to collaborate and solve problems together is what is important. Social networks have reinforced this ideology by seeming to make knowledge and judgment collective functions. But the progressivist position on the importance of learning facts and training individual judgment withers under scrutiny, and, pace Tapscott and Shirky, events of the last decade have not made it more durable.
In sum, there are two basic issues here. Do we have any choice about ceding control of the self to an increasingly compelling hive mind? Yes. And should we cede such control, or instead strive, temperately, to develop our own minds very well and direct our own attention carefully? The answer, I think, is obvious.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Peter Hubbard of HarperCollins for his encouragement. I am also indebted to my agent, Max Brockman, who saw the potential for this book, and to Sara Lippincott for her thoughtful and meticulous editing.
Also by John Brockman
AS AUTHOR
By the Late John Brockman
37
Afterwords
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
Digerati
AS EDITOR
About Bateson
Speculations
Doing Science
Ways of Knowing
Creativity
The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years
The Next Fifty Years
The New Humanists
Curious Minds
What We Believe but Cannot Prove
My Einstein
Intelligent Thought
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
What Are You Optimistic About?
What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
This Will Change Everything
AS COEDITOR
How Things Are (with Katinka Matson)
Copyright
IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK? Copyright © 2011 by Edge Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into an
y information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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ISBN 978-0-06-202044-4
EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062078551
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* “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, July–August 2008.
* “Targeting Regions of Interest for the Study of the Illiterate Brain,” International Journal of Psychology 39, 1 (2004): 5–17.
* “Can Learning to Read and Write Change the Brain Organization? An Electrophysiological Study,” International Journal of Psychology 39, 1 (2004): 27–35.
* Robin Dunbar, How Many Friends Does One Person Need: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).
* T. A. Keller and M. A. Just, “Altering Cortical Connectivity: Remediation-Induced Changes in the White Matter of Poor Readers,” Neuron 64 (2009): 624–31.
* T. F. Oberlander et al., “Prenatal Exposure to Maternal Depression, Neonatal Methylation of Human Glucocorticoid Receptor Gene (NR3C1) and Infant Cortisol Stress Responses,” Epigenetics 3, 2 (2008): 97–106.
* D. C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” Summary Report AFOSR-3233, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., October 1962.
* “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84, 3 (1977): 231–59.
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? Page 36
