Possibly like you, all my e-mail goes into my Sent mailbox, just sitting there in case I want to check back on what I said to whom years ago. So what a surprise to see that I send approximately 18,250 e-mails each year (roughly 50 a day). Assuming three minutes per e-mail (let’s face it, I can’t afford to spend too long thinking about what I want to say), that’s about 1,000 hours a year on e-mail alone. I’ve been on e-mail since the early nineties. Was that time well spent?
The answer is both yes and no. Yes, I have been able to keep in touch with family, friends, and colleagues in far-flung corners of the planet with ease, and I have managed to pull off projects with teams spread across different cities in time scales that previously would have been unthinkable. All this feeds my continued use of e-mail. But whereas these undoubted benefits are the reasons why I continue to e-mail, e-mailing is not without its cost. Most important, as my analysis shows, e-mail eats my time, just as it likely eats yours. And unlike Darwin’s famous 15,000 letters (penned with thought, and now the subject of the Darwin Correspondence Project in my university library in Cambridge), three-minute e-mail exchanges do not deliver communication with any depth and, as such, are not intellectually valuable in their own right.
We all recognize that e-mail has its addictive side. Each time a message arrives, there’s the chance it might contain something exciting, something new, something special, a new opportunity. Like all effective behavioral reinforcement schedules, the reward is intermittent: Maybe one in a hundred e-mails contains something I really want to know or hear about. That’s just enough to keep me checking my inbox, but it means that perhaps only 10 of the 1,000 hours I spent on e-mails this year were rewarded.
Bite-size e-mails also carry another cost. We all know there’s no substitute for thinking hard and deep about a problem and how to solve it, or for getting to grips with a new area; such tasks demand long periods of concentrated attention. Persistent, frequent e-mail messages threaten our capacity for the real work. Becoming aware of what e-mail is doing to our allocation of time is the first step to regaining control. As in stifling other potential addictions, we should perhaps attempt to counter the e-mail habit by restricting it to certain times of the day, or by creating e-mail-free zones by turning off Wi-Fi. This year’s Edge question at least gives me pause to think whether I really want to be spending a thousand hours a year on e-mail at the expense of more valuable activities.
Thinking Like the Internet, Thinking Like Biology
Nigel Goldenfeld
Physicist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Although I used the Internet back when it was just ARPANET—and even earlier, as a teenager, using a teletype to log on to a state-of-the-art Honeywell mainframe from my school—I don’t believe my way of thinking was changed by the Internet until around 2000. Why not?
Back in my school days, the Internet was linear, predictable, and boring. It never talked back. When I hacked into the computer at MIT, running an early symbolic-manipulator program, something that could do algebra in a painfully inadequate way, I just used the Internet as a perfectly predictable tool. In my day-to-day life as a scientist (the theoretical physicist geek from central casting), I mostly still do.
In 1996, I cofounded a software company that built its products and operated essentially entirely through the Internet; whether this was more efficient than a bricks-and-mortar company is debatable, but the fact was that through this medium fabulously gifted individuals were able to participate—people who never would have dreamed of relocating for such work. But this was still a linear, predictable, and essentially uninteresting use of the Internet.
No, the Internet is changing the way I think because its whole is greater than the sum of its parts—because of its massive connectivity and the resulting emergent phenomena. When I was a child, they said we would be living on the moon, that we would have antigravity jet packs and videophones. They lied about everything but the videophones. Via private blogs, Skype, and a $40 webcam, I can collaborate with my colleagues, write equations on my blackboard, and build networks of thought that stagger me with their effectiveness. My students and I work together so well through the Internet that its always-on library dominates our discussions and helps us find the sharp questions that drive our research and thinking infinitely faster than before.
My day job is to make discoveries through thought, principally by exploiting analogies through acts of intellectual arbitrage. When we find two analogous questions in what were previously perceived to be unrelated fields, one field will invariably be more developed than the other, so there is a scientific opportunity. This is how physicists go hunting. The Internet has become a better tool than the old paper scientific literature because it responds in real time.
To see why this is a big deal for me, consider the following “homework hack.” You want to become an instant expert in something that matters to you: maybe a homework assignment, maybe researching a life-threatening disease afflicting someone close to you. You could research it on the Internet using a search engine—but, as you know, you can search but you can’t really find. Google gives you unstructured information, and for a young person in a hurry that is simply not good enough. Search engines are a linear, predictable, and essentially uninteresting way to use the Internet.
Instead, try the following hack. Step 1: Make a wiki page on the topic. Step 2: Fill it with complete nonsense. Step 3: Wait a few days. Step 4: Visit the wiki page and harvest the results of what generous and anonymous souls from—well, who cares where they’re from or who they are?—have corrected and enhanced in, one presumes, fits of righteous indignation. It really works. I know because I have seen both sides of this transaction. There you have it: the emergence of a truly global, collective entity, something that has arisen from humans plus the Internet. It talks back.
This homework hack is, in reality, little more than the usual pattern of academic discourse but carried out, in science fiction master William Gibson’s memorable phrase, with “one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.” Speed matters, because life is short. The next generation of professional thinkers already have all the right instincts about the infinite library that is their external mind, accessible in real time, and capable of accelerating the already Lamarckian process of evolution in thought and knowledge on time scales that really matter. I’m starting to get it, too.
Roughly 3 billion years ago, microbial life invented the Internet and Lamarckian evolution. For them, the information is stored in molecules and recorded in genes transmitted between consenting microbes by a variety of mechanisms we are still uncovering. Want to know how to become a more virulent microbial pathogen? Download the gene! Want to know how to hotwire a motorcycle? Go to the Website! So much quicker than random trial-and-error evolution, and it works . . . right now! And your children’s always-on community of friends, texting lols and other quick messages that really say “I’m here, I’m your friend, let’s have a party,” is no different than the quorum sensing of microbes, counting their numbers so that they can do something collectively, such as invade a host or grow a fruiting body from a biofilm.
I’m starting to think like the Internet, starting to think like biology. My thinking is better, faster, cheaper, and more evolvable because of the Internet. And so is yours. You just don’t know it yet.
The Internet Makes Me Think in the Present Tense
Douglas Rushkoff
Media analyst; documentary writer; author, Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
How does the Internet change the way I think? It puts me in the present tense. It’s as if my cognitive resources have been shifted from my hard drive to my RAM. That which is happening right now is valued, and everything in the past or future becomes less relevant.
The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page. And as a resul
t, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.
I feel it when I’m wading through a stack of e-mails, keeping up with an endless Twitter feed, accepting Facebook “friends” from a past I prefer not to remember, or making myself available on the Web to readers to whom I should feel grateful but instead feel obligated. And it’s not a matter of what any of these folks might want me to do, but rather when. They want it now.
This is not a bias of the Internet itself but of the way it has changed from an opt-in activity to an always-on condition of my life. The bias of the medium was never toward real-time activity but toward time shifting. UNIX, the operating system of the Net, doesn’t work in real time; it sits and waits for human commands. Likewise, early Internet forums and bulletin boards were discussions that users returned to at their convenience. I dropped in on the conversation, then came back the next evening or the next week to see how it had developed. I took the time to consider what I might say—to contemplate someone else’s response. An Internet exchange was only as rich as the amount of time I allowed to pass between posts.
Once the Internet changed from a resource at my desk into an appendage chirping from my pocket and vibrating on my thigh, however, the value of depth was replaced by that of immediacy masquerading as relevancy. This is why Google is changing itself from a search engine to a “live” search engine, why e-mail devolved to SMS and blogs devolved to tweets. It’s why schoolchildren can no longer engage in linear argument, why narrative structure collapsed into reality TV, why almost no one can engage in meaningful dialog about long-term global issues. It creates an environment in which a few incriminating e-mails between scientists generate more news than our much slower but much more significant climate crisis.
It’s as if the relentless demand of networks for me to be everywhere, all the time, was denying me access to the moment in which I am really living. And it is this sense of disconnection—more than distraction, multitasking, or long-distance engagement—that makes the Internet so aggravating.
In some senses, this was the goal of those who developed the computers and networks on which we depend today. Technology visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and James Licklider sought to develop machines that could do our remembering for us. Computers would free us from the tyranny of the past (as well as the horrors of World War II), allowing us to forget everything and devote our minds to solving the problems of today. The information would still be there; it would simply be stored out of body, in a machine.
That might have worked had technological development leaned toward the option of living life disconnected from those machines whenever access to their memory banks was not required. Instead, I feel encouraged to use networks not just to access information but to access other people and grant them access to me—wherever and whenever I happen to be.
This always-on approach to digital technology overwhelms my nervous system rather than expanding it. Likewise, the simultaneity of information streaming toward me prevents parsing or consideration. It becomes a constant flow that must be managed, perpetually.
The nowness of the Internet engenders impulsive, unthinking responses instead of considered ones, and a tendency to think of communications as a way to bark orders or fend off those of others. I want to satisfy the devices chirping and vibrating in my pockets, if only to make them stop. Instead of looking at each digital conversation as an opportunity for depth, I experience them as involuntary triggers of my nervous system. Like my fellow networked humans, I now suffer the physical and emotional stresses previously associated with careers such as air traffic controller and 911 operator.
By surrendering my natural rhythms to the immediacy of my networks, I am optimizing myself and my thinking to my technologies rather than the other way around. I feel as though I am speeding up when I am actually becoming less productive, less thoughtful, and less capable of asserting any agency over the world in which I live. The result is something akin to future shock. Except that in our era, it’s more of a present shock.
I try to look at the positive: Our Internet-enabled emphasis on the present may have liberated us from the twentieth century’s dangerously compelling ideological narratives. No one—well, hardly anyone—can still be persuaded that brutal means are justified by mythological ends. And people are less likely to believe employers’ and corporations’ false promises of future rewards for their continued loyalty.
But—for me, anyway—the Internet has not brought greater awareness of what is going on around us. I am not approaching some Zen state of an infinite moment, completely at one with my surroundings, connected to others and aware of myself on any fundamental level. Rather, I am increasingly in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before me are ignored. My ability to create a plan—much less follow through on it—is undermined by my need to be able to improvise my way through any number of external effects that stand to derail me at any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and now, I end up reacting to an ever-present assault of simultaneous impulses and commands.
The Internet tells me I am thinking in real time, when what it really does, increasingly, is take away the real and take away the time.
Social Prosthetic Systems
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Psychologist, dean of social sciences, Harvard University; coauthor (with Robin S. Rosenberg), Fundamentals of Psychology in Context
Other people can help us compensate for our mental and emotional deficiencies, much as a wooden leg can compensate for a physical deficiency. Specifically, other people can extend our intelligence and help us understand and regulate our emotions. I’ve argued that such relationships can become so close that other people essentially act as extensions of oneself, much as a wooden leg does. When another person helps us in such ways, he or she is participating in what I’ve called a “social prosthetic system.” Such systems do not need to operate face-to-face, and it’s clear to me that the Internet is expanding the range of my own social prosthetic systems. It’s already an enormous repository of the products of many minds, and the interactive aspects of the evolving Internet are bringing it ever closer to the sort of personal interactions that underlie such systems.
Even in its current state, the Internet has extended my memory, perception, and judgment.
Regarding memory: Once I look up something on the Internet, I don’t need to retain all the details for future use—I know where to find that information again and can quickly and easily do so. More generally, the Internet functions as if it were my memory. This function of the Internet is particularly striking when I’m writing; I’m no longer comfortable writing if I’m not connected to the Internet. It’s become natural to check facts as I write, taking a minute or two to dip into PubMed, Wikipedia, or the like. When I write with a browser open in the background, it’s as though the browser were an extension of myself.
Regarding perception: Sometimes I feel as if the Internet has granted me clairvoyance. I can see things at a distance. I’m particularly struck by the ease of using videos, allowing me to witness a particular event in the news. It’s a cliché, but the world really does feel smaller.
Regarding judgment: The Internet has made me smarter in matters small and large. For example, when I’m writing a textbook, it has become second nature to check a dozen definitions of a key term, which helps me distill the essence of its meaning. But more than that, I now regularly compare my views with those of many others. If I have a “new idea,” I now quickly look to see whether somebody else has already conceived of it, or something similar—and I then compare what I think to what others have thought. This inevitably hones my own views. Moreover, I use the Internet for sanity checks, trying to gauge whether my emotional reactions to an event are reasonable by quickly comparing them with those of others.
These effects of the Internet have become even more striking since I’ve begun using a smartphone. I now regularly pull out my p
hone to check a fact, watch a video, read blogs. Such activities fill the spaces that used to be dead time (such as waiting for somebody to arrive for a lunch meeting).
But that’s the upside. The downside is that in those dead periods I often would let my thoughts drift and sometimes would have an unexpected insight or idea. Those opportunities are now fewer and farther between. Like anything else, constant connectivity has posed various tradeoffs; nothing is without a price. But in this case—on balance—it’s a small price. I’m a better thinker now than I was before I integrated the Internet into my mental and emotional processing.
Evolving a Global Brain
W. Tecumseh Fitch
Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna; author, The Evolution of Language
When I consider the effect of the Internet on my thought, I keep coming back to the same metaphor. What makes the Internet fundamentally new is the many-to-many topology of connections it allows. Suddenly any two Internet-equipped humans can transfer essentially any information, flexibly and efficiently. We can transfer words, code, equations, music, or video anytime to anyone, essentially for free. We are no longer dependent on publishers or media producers to connect us. This parallels what happened in animal evolution as we evolved complex brains controlling our behavior, partly displacing the basically hormonal, one-to-many systems that came before. So let’s consider this new information topology from the long evolutionary viewpoint, by comparing it with the information revolution that occurred during animal evolution over the last half billion years: the evolution of brains.
Our planet has been around for 4.5 billion years, and life appeared very early, almost 4 billion years ago. But for three-quarters of the subsequent period, life was exclusively unicellular, similar to today’s bacteria, yeast, or amoebae. The most profound organic revolution, after life itself, was thus the transition to complex multicellular organisms, such as trees, mushrooms, and ourselves.
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? Page 17