Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  My certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than importing authority, I am reduced to creating my own certainty—not just about things I care about but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge. That means that, in general, I assume more and more that what I know is wrong. We might consider this state perfect for science, but it also means I’m more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons. Nonetheless, the embrace of uncertainty is one way my thinking has changed.

  Uncertainty is a kind of liquidity. I think my thinking has become more liquid. It is less fixed, like text in a book, and more fluid, like, say, text in Wikipedia. My opinions shift more. My interests rise and fall more quickly. I am less interested in Truth with a capital T and more interested in truths, plural. I accord the subjective an important role in assembling the objective from many data points. The incremental, plodding progress of imperfect science seems the only way to know anything.

  While hooked into the network of networks, I feel as though I’m a network myself, trying to achieve reliability from unreliable parts. And in my quest to assemble truths from half-truths, nontruths, and some other truths scattered in the flux (this creation of the known is now our job and not the job of authorities), I find my mind attracted to fluid ways of thinking (scenarios, provisional beliefs) and fluid media such as mashups, Twitter, and search. But as I flow through this slippery Web of ideas, it often feels like a waking dream.

  We don’t really know what dreams are for—only that they satisfy some fundamental need. Someone watching me surf the Web, as I jump from one suggested link to another, would see a daydream. Today I was in a crowd of people who watched a barefoot man eat dirt, then the face of a boy who was singing began to melt, then Santa burned a Christmas tree, then I was floating inside a mud house on the very tippy-top of the world, then Celtic knots untied themselves, then a guy told me the formula for making clear glass, then I was watching myself back in high school riding a bicycle. And that was just the first few minutes of my day on the Web this morning. The trancelike state we fall into while following the undirected path of links may be a terrible waste of time—or, like dreams, it might be a productive waste of time. Perhaps we are tapping into our collective unconscious in a way that we cannot when we are watching the directed stream of TV, radio, and newspapers. Maybe click-dreaming is a way for all of us to have the same dream, independent of what we click on.

  This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts—or, to put it more simply, I can no longer tell online when I’m working and when I’m playing. For some people, the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the Internet: it is the high-priced waster of time, it breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity. More important, I believe that the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.

  In fact, the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my overeducated mind. And it is not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find that many trailers are better than their movie.) Newspapers become Twitter posts. Scientific papers are served up in snippets on Google. I happily swim in this rising ocean of fragments.

  While I rush into the Net to hunt for these tidbits, or to surf on its lucid dream, I’ve noticed a different approach to my thinking. My thinking is more active, less contemplative. Rather than beginning to investigate a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly, my mind nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately, instantly go.

  I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting to data, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail, a start of making something mine. I don’t wait. Don’t have to wait. I act on ideas first now, instead of thinking on them. For some folks, this is the worst of the Net—the loss of contemplation. Others feel that all this frothy activity is simply stupid busywork, spinning of wheels, illusory action.

  I ask myself, “Compared to what?” Compared to the passive consumption of TV or sucking up bully newspapers, or to merely sitting at home going in circles, musing about stuff in my head without any new inputs? I find myself much more productive by acting first. The emergence of blogs and Wikipedia are expressions of this same impulse, to act (write) first and think (filter) later. To my eye, the hundreds of millions people online this very minute are not wasting time with silly associative links but are engaged in a more productive way of thinking than the equivalent hundreds of millions people were fifty years ago.

  This approach does encourage tiny bits—but surprisingly, at the same time, it allows us to give more attention to works that are far more complex, bigger, and more complicated than ever before. These new creations contain more data and require more attention over longer periods, and they are more successful as the Internet expands. This parallel trend is less visible at first, because of a common shortsightedness that equates the Internet with text.

  To a first approximation, the Internet is words on a screen—Google, papers, blogs. But this first glance ignores the vastly larger underbelly of the Internet—moving images on a screen. People (and not just young kids; I include myself ) no longer go to books and text first. If people have a question, they head first for YouTube. For fun, we go to online massive games, or catch streaming movies, including factual videos (documentaries are in a renaissance). New visual media are stampeding onto the Net. This is where the Internet’s center of attention lies, not in text alone. Because of online fans, streaming on demand, rewinding at will, and all the other liquid abilities of the Internet, directors started creating movies—such as Lost and The Wire—that were more than a hundred hours long.

  These epics had multiple, interweaving plot lines, multiple protagonists, and an incredible depth of characters, and they demanded sustained attention that not only was beyond that required by previous TV and ninety-minute movies but also would have shocked Dickens and other novelists of yore. (“You mean they could follow all that, and then want more? Over how many years?”) I would never have believed myself capable of enjoying such complicated stories or caring about them enough to put in the time. My attention has grown. In a similar way, the depth, complexity, and demands of games can equal those marathon movies or any great book.

  But the most important way the Internet has changed the direction of my attention, and thus my thinking, is that it has become one thing. It may look as though I’m spending endless nanoseconds on a series of tweets, endless microseconds surfing Web pages or wandering among channels, endless minutes hovering over one book snippet after another—but in reality I’m spending ten hours a day paying attention to the Internet. I return to it after a few minutes, day after day, with essentially full-time attention. As do you.

  We are developing an intense, sustained conversation with this large thing. The fact that it’s made up of a million loosely connected pieces is distracting us. The producers of Websites, the hordes of commenters online, and the movie moguls reluctantly letting us stream their movies don’t believe that their products are mere pixels in a big global show, but they are. It is one thing now: an intermedia with 2 billion screens peering into it. The whole ball of connections—including all its books, pages, tweets, movies, games, posts, streams—is like one vast global book (or movie, etc.), and we are only beginning to learn how to read it. Knowing that this large thing is there, and that I am in constant communication with it, has changed how I think.

  To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways

  Richard S
aul Wurman

  Architect, cartographer; founder, TED Conference; author, 33: Understanding Change and the Change in Understanding

  In the beginning, I drew a circle in the sand with a stick.

  The pencil changed how I thought. The ballpoint pen changed how I thought. My increasing vocabulary changed what I could think of.

  The telephone allowed me the fiction of being in remote places.

  My first Sharp Wizard extended my memory.

  Television continues to increase my understanding at an explosive rate.

  Each and every modality allows for the ability of your mind to dream the waking dream in new ways.

  Louis Kahn designed his buildings using vine charcoal on yellow “trash” paper. This allowed him to draw over and over the same drawing and smudge it out with the ball of his hand. This affected his designs.

  Frank Gehry dreams in scrawls and crushed paper, and they transform magically into reality.

  Each modality changes even what you can even think of. The Internet is just one big step along the way to flying through understanding and the invention of patterns.

  It’s a good one.

  Tweet Me Nice

  Ian Gold and Joel Gold

  Ian Gold: Neuroscientist; Canada Research Chair in Philosophy and Psychiatry, McGill University

  Joel Gold: Psychiatrist; clinical assistant professor of psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine

  The social changes the Internet is bringing about have changed the way the two of us think about madness. The change in our thinking started, strangely enough, with reflections on Internet friends. The number of your Facebook friends, like the make of the car you drive, confers a certain status. It is not uncommon for someone to have virtual friends in the hundreds, which seems to show, among other things, that the Internet is doing more for our social lives than wine coolers or the pill.

  In the days before Facebook and Twitter, time placed severe constraints on friendship. Even the traditional Christmas letter, now a fossil in the anthropological museum, couldn’t be stamped and addressed 754 times by anybody with a full-time job. Technology has transcended time and made the Christmas letter viable again, no matter how large one’s social circle. Ironically, electronic social networking has made the Christmas letter otiose; your friends hardly need an account of the year’s highlights when they can be fed a stream of reports on the day’s, along with your reflections on logical positivism or Lady Gaga.

  It’s hard to doubt that more friends are a good thing, friendship being among life’s greatest boons. As Aristotle put it, “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” But of course friends are only as good as they are genuine, and it is hard to know what to think about Facebook friends. This familiar idea was made vivid to us recently by a very depressed young woman who came to see one of us for the first time. Among the causes of her depression, she said, was that she had no friends. Sitting on her psychiatrist’s couch, desperately alone, she talked; and while she talked, she tweeted. Perhaps she was simply telling her Twitter friends that she was in a psychiatrist’s office; perhaps she was telling them that she was talking to her psychiatrist about having no real friends; and perhaps—despite her protestations to the contrary—she was getting some of friendship’s benefits from a virtual community. In the face of this striking contrast between the real and the virtual, however, it’s hard not to think that a Facebook or Twitter friend isn’t quite what Aristotle had in mind.

  Still, one probably shouldn’t make too much of this. Many of the recipients of Christmas letters wouldn’t have been counted as friends in Aristotle’s sense, either. There is a distinction to be made between one’s friends and one’s social group, a much larger community, which might include the Christmas letter people, the colleagues one floor below, or the family members you catch up with at Bar Mitzvahs and funerals. Indeed, the Internet is creating a hybrid social group that includes real friends and friends of friends who are little more than strangers. Beyond these, many of us are also interacting with genuine strangers in chat rooms, virtual spaces, and Second Life.

  In contrast with friendship, however, an expanded social group is unlikely to be an unalloyed good, because it is hardly news that the people in our lives are the sources of not only our greatest joys but also our most profound suffering. The sadistic boss can blight an existence, however full it may be of affection from others, and the sustaining spouse can morph into That Cheating Bastard. A larger social group is thus a double-edged sword, creating more opportunities for human misery as well as satisfaction. A hybrid social group that includes near-strangers and true strangers may also open the door to real danger.

  The mixed blessings of social life seem to have been writ large in our evolutionary history. The last time social life expanded as significantly as it has in the last couple of years was before there were any humans. The transition from nonprimates to primates came with an expansion of social groups, and many scientists now think that the primate brain evolved under the pressures of this novel form of social life. With a larger social group, there are more opportunities for cooperation and mutual benefit, but there are also novel threats. Members of a social group will each get more food if they hunt together, for example, than they would by hunting alone, but they also expose themselves to free riders, who take without contributing. With a larger social group, the physical environment is more manageable, but deception and social exploitation emerge as new dangers. Since both cooperation and competition are cognitively demanding, those with bigger brains—and the concomitant brainpower—will have the advantage in both. The evolution of human intelligence thus may have been driven primarily by the kindness or malice of others.

  Some of the best evidence for this idea is that there is a relation in primates between brain size (more precisely, relative neocortical volume) and the size of the social group in which the members of the species live: bigger brain, bigger group. Plotting social group as a function of brain size in primates allows us to extrapolate to humans. The evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar calculated that the volume of the human cortex predicts a social group of 150—about the size of the villages that would have constituted our social environment for a great deal of evolutionary time and which can still be found in “primitive” societies.*

  How might one test this hypothesis? In nonhuman primates, membership in a social group is typically designated by mutual grooming. Outside of hairdressing colleges and teenage girls’ sleep-overs, this isn’t a very useful criterion for humans. But the Christmas letter (or card) does better. Getting a Christmas card is a minimal indicator of membership in someone’s social group. In an ingenious experiment, Dunbar asked subjects to keep a record of the Christmas cards they sent. Depending on how one counted, the number of card recipients was somewhere between 125 and 154, just about the right number for our brains. It appears, then, that over the course of millions of years of human history our brains have been tuned to the social opportunities and threats presented by groups of 150 or so. The Internet has turned the human village into a megalopolis and has thus inaugurated what might be the biggest sea change in human evolution since the primeval campfires.

  We come at last to madness. Psychiatry has known for decades that the megalopolis—indeed, a city of any size—breeds psychosis. In particular, schizophrenia, the paradigm of a purely biological mental illness, becomes more prevalent as city size increases, even when the city is hardly more than a village. This is not because mental illness in general becomes more common in cities; nor is it true that people who are psychotic tend to drift toward cities or stay in them. In creating much larger social groups for ourselves, ranging from true friends to near strangers, could we be laying the ground for a pathogenic virtual city in which psychosis will be on the rise? Or will Facebook and Twitter draw us closer to friends in Aristotle’s sense, who can act as psychic prophylaxis against the madness-making power of others? Whatever the effects of the Int
ernet on our inner lives, it seems clear that in changing the structure of our outer lives—the lives intertwined with those of others—the Internet is likely to be a more potent shaper of our minds than we have begun to imagine.

  The Dazed State

  Richard Foreman

  Playwright and director; founder, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater

  How is the Internet changing the way I think? But what is this “thinking” that I assume I do along with everybody else? Probably there is no agreement about what thinking consists of. But I certainly do not believe that “gathering information” is thinking, and that has obviously been an activity that has expanded and sped up as a result of the Internet. For me, to think is to withdraw from gathered information into a blankness, within which something arises, pops out, is born.

  Of course it will be maintained that what pops out may have its roots—may be conditioned—by many factors in my experiential past. Nevertheless, whereas the Internet swamps us in “connectedness” and “facts,” it is only in the withdrawal from those that I claim a space for thinking.

  So in one sense the Internet expands the arena within which thinking may resonate, and so perhaps the thinking is thereby attuned somewhat differently. But I am one of those who believe that while it is clearly life-changing, it is no way—if you will—soul-changing. Accessing the ever expanding, ever faster Internet means a life that is changing as it becomes the life of a surfer (just as life might change if you moved to a California beach community). You become more and more agile, balancing on top of the flow, leaping from hyperlink to hyperlink, giving your mental environment a certain shape based on those chosen jumps.

  But the Internet sweeps you away from where and what you were. So instead of filling you with the fire to dig deeper into the magic bottomless source that is the self, it lets you drift into the dazed state of having everything at your fingertips—which you use in order to caress the world, of course, but only the world as it assumes the shape of the now manifest, rather than the world of the still unimaginable.