The modern Internet has achieved much of what Ted Nelson articulated decades ago in his vision of the Xanadu project, or Doug Engelbart in his human augmentation vision at SRI. Nearly all useful knowledge is now accessible instantaneously from much of the world. Our effective personal memories are now vastly larger—essentially infinite. Our identity is embedded in what we know. And how I think is an expression of that identity.
For me, the Internet has led to that deep sense of collaboration, awareness, and ubiquitous knowledge that means that my thought processes are not bound by the meat machine that is my brain, nor my locality, nor my time.
One’s Guild
Stewart Brand
Founder, Whole Earth Catalog; cofounder, the WELL; cofounder, Global Business Network; author, Whole Earth Discipline
I couldn’t function without them, and I suspect the same is true for nearly all effective people. By “them,” I mean my closest intellectual collaborators. They are the major players in my social, extended mind. How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think.
Our association is looser than a team but closer than a cohort, and it’s not a club or a workgroup or an elite. I’ll call it a guild. The members of my guild run their own operations, and none of us reports to any other. All we do is keep close track of what the others are thinking and doing. Often we collaborate directly, but most of the time we don’t. Everyone in my guild has his or her own guild, each of which is largely different from mine. I’m probably not considered a member of some of them. My guild nowadays consists of Danny Hillis, Brian Eno, Peter Schwartz, Kevin Kelly, John Brockman, Alexander Rose, and Ryan Phelan. Occasionally we intersect institutionally via the Long Now Foundation, Global Business Network, or Edge.org.
One’s guild is a conversation extending over years and decades. I hearken to my gang because we have overlapping interests, and my gang keeps surprising me. Familiar as I am with them, I can’t finish their sentences. Their constant creativity feeds my creativity, and I try to do the same for them. Often the way I ponder something is to channel my guild members: “Would Danny consider this a waste of time?” “How would Brian find something exciting here?” “Is this idea something Kevin or Brockman might run with, and where would they run with it?”
I seldom see my guild members in person (except the one I’m married to). We seldom talk on the phone. Yet we interact weekly through the crude old Internet tools of e-mail and links. (That no doubt reflects our age; younger guilds presumably use Facebook or Twitter or whatever’s next in that lineage.)
Thanks to my guild’s Internet-mediated conversation, my neuronal thinking is enhanced immeasurably by our digital thinking.
Trust Nothing, Debate Everything
Jason Calacanis
Internet entrepreneur; founder, Mahalo.com
As a former journalist, I used to withhold judgment and refrain from speculating about breaking stories until “all the facts” were in. I used to keep a mental scorecard of an issue with the confirmed facts neatly organized. However, with the velocity of information and tools to curate and process it on the Internet, I’ve moved to speculation as my scorecard. The real-time Web means we get to flip our positions, argue all sides of a debate, and test theories. We’re being lied to and manipulated more than we’re being told the truth, so instead of trying to figure out what’s true, I’d rather speculate in my social network and see what comes back.
When the November 2009 shooting at Fort Hood happened, I immediately speculated on Facebook and Twitter that Nidal Malik Hasan’s name was probably an indication of a terrorism link—it couldn’t be coincidence, right? That was the first thing you thought, right? Dozens of responses came back, outraged that I would speculate to my 80,000 followers without “knowing for sure.” Most claimed we should wait until the authorities completed their investigation. A couple of folks thought I was showing some bias against Muslims—which, of course, I was.
Any investigator would follow the radical Muslim pattern when faced with the same evidence, and certainly the newscasters on CNN were thinking it. The terrorism connection at Fort Hood was so obvious that the CNN reporters made a point of saying that just because the name sounded like the names of 9/11 hijackers, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Really? Isn’t that exactly what the investigators did? Isn’t that what the Internet was doing while CNN anchors fumbled their way through the moment, trying to fill airtime with anything but speculation about radical Muslims?
They’ve tracked Hasan’s connections to a mosque in Virginia where two of the September 11 hijackers attended services. Speculation on the Internet was correct this time, and CNN was doing the “responsible thing” by not participating in it. Really? Doesn’t speculation lead to debate, which leads to, one hopes, some resolution?
Jumping to conclusions is a critical piece of information gathering, and we should be doing it more, not less. The Internet is built to route around bad routers and bad facts. Hasan’s business card had “SoA” on it, which stands for—wait for it—“Soldier of Allah.” If only someone had jumped to some conclusions about that fact on her Twitter account.
Consuming passive news gave way, in 2003 and 2004, to commenting on blogs. Now we all have blogs tethered to our mobile phones, even if they are micro in nature, with Facebook and Twitter accounts. We shouldn’t wait for facts; we should be speculating and testing assumptions as news and knowledge unfold. Facts are, of course, valuable, but speculation gets me further and builds better webs in my mind.
We’ve moved from being jurors to being investigators, and the audience is onstage. Support thought bombs and the people who throw them into your social graph. It’s messy but essential. Study the reactions on either side of the aisle, because reactions can be more telling than the facts sometimes. That’s how the Internet has changed my thinking: Trust nothing, debate everything.
Harmful One-Liners, an Ocean of Facts, and Rewired Minds
Haim Harari
Physicist, former president, Weizmann Institute of Science; author, A View from the Eye of the Storm: Terror and Reason in the Middle East
It is entirely possible that the Internet is changing our way of thinking in more ways than I am willing to admit, but there are three clear changes that are palpable.
The first is the increasing brevity of messages.
Between Twittering, chatting, and sending abbreviated BlackBerry e-mails, the “old” sixty-second sound bite of TV newscasts is now converted into one-liners attempting to describe ideas, principles, events, complex situations, and moral positions. Even when the message itself is somewhat longer, the fact that we are exposed to more messages than ever before means that the attention dose allocated to each item is tiny. The result, for the general public, is a flourishing of extremist views on everything. Not just in politics, where only the ideas of the lunatic far left and far right can be stated in one sentence, but also in matters of science.
It is easy to state in one sentence nonsense such as “The theory of evolution is wrong,” “Global warming is a myth,” “Vaccinations cause autism,” and “God”—mine, yours, or hers—“has all the answers.” It requires long essays to explain and discuss the ifs and buts of real science and of real life.
I find that this trend makes me a fanatic antiextremist. I am boiling mad whenever I see or read such telegraphic (to use an ancient terminology) elaborations of ideas and facts, knowing that they are wrong and misleading yet find their way into so many hearts and minds. Even worse, people who are still interested in a deeper analysis and a balanced view of topics—whether scientific, social, political, or other—are considered leftovers from an earlier generation and labeled as extremists of the opposite color by the fanatics of one corner or another.
The second change is the diminishing role of factual knowledge in the thinking process. The thought patterns of different people on different subjects require varying degrees of knowing facts, being able to correlate them, creating new ideas, distinguishing be
tween important and secondary matters, analyzing processes, knowing when to prefer pure logic and when to let common sense dominate, and numerous other components of a complex mental exercise.
The Internet allows us to know fewer facts, since we can be sure they are always literally at our fingertips, thus reducing their importance as a component of the thought process. This is similar to, but much more profound than, the reduced role of computation and simple arithmetic with the introduction of calculators. But we should not forget that often in the scientific discovery process the greatest challenges are to ask the right question rather than answer a well-posed question and to correlate facts that no one thought of connecting. The existence of many available facts somewhere in the infinite ocean of the Internet is no help in such an endeavor. I find that my scientific thinking is changed very little by the availability of all of these facts, though my grasp of social, economic, and political issues is enriched by having many more facts at my disposal. An important warning is necessary here: A crucial enhanced element of the thought process, demanded by the flood of available facts, must be the ability to evaluate the credibility of facts and quasi-facts. Both are abundant on the Web, and telling them apart is not as easy as it may seem.
The third change is in the entire process of teaching and learning. Here it is clear that the change must be profound and multifaceted, but it is equally clear that because of the ultraconservative nature of the educational system, change has not yet happened on a large scale. The Internet brings to us art treasures, the ability to simulate complex experiments, mechanisms of learning by trial and error, less need to memorize facts and numbers, explanations and lessons from the greatest teachers on Earth, special aids for children with special needs, and numerous other incomparable marvels unavailable to previous generations. Anyone involved in teaching, from kindergarten to graduate school, must be aware of the endless opportunities as well as the lurking dangers. These changes in learning, when they materialize, may create an entirely different pattern of knowledge, understanding, and thinking in the student mind.
I’m amazed by how little has changed in the world of education, but whether we like it or not, the change must happen, and it will happen. It may take another decade or two, but education will never be the same.
An interesting follow-up is the question of whether the minds and brains of children growing up in an Internet-inspired educational system will be physically “wired” differently from those of earlier generations. I tend to speculate in the affirmative, but this issue may be settled only by responses to the Edge question of 2040.
What Other People Think
Marti Hearst
Computer scientist, University of California, Berkeley, School of Information; author, Search User Interfaces
In graduate school, as a computer scientist whose focus was on search engines even before the Web, I always dreamed of an Internet that would replace the inefficiencies of libraries, making all important information easily available online. Amazingly, this came to pass, despite what seemed like insurmountable blockages in the early days.
But something I did not anticipate is how social the Internet would become. When the Web took off, I expected to see recipes online. But today I also expect to learn what other people thought about a recipe, including what ingredients they added, what salad they paired it with, and who in their family liked or disliked it. This multitude of perspectives has made me a better cook.
If I enjoy a television show, within minutes or hours of the airtime of the latest episode I expect to be able to take part in a delightful, informed conversation about it, anchored by an essay by a professional writer, supported with high-quality user-contributed comments that not only enhance my pleasure of the show but also reveal new insights.
And not only can I get software online, but in the last few years a dizzying cornucopia of free software components have appeared, making it possible to do in just days research and development that would have taken months or years in the past. There have always been online forums to discuss software—in fact, coding was one of the most common topics of early online groups. But the variety and detail of the kind of information that other people selflessly supply one another with today is staggering. And the design of online question-answering sites has moved from crufty to excellent in just a few years.
Most relevant to the scientists and researchers who contribute to the Edge question: We see the use of the Web to enhance communication in the virtual college, with academic meetings held online, math proofs done collaboratively on blogs, and deadly viruses isolated within weeks by research labs working together online.
Sure, we used e-mail in the early eighties, and there were online bulletin boards for at least a decade before the Web, but only a small percentage of the population used them, and it was usually over a very slow modem. In the early days of the Web, ordinary people’s voices were limited primarily to information ghettos such as Geocities; most text was produced by academics and businesses. There was very little give-and-take. By contrast, according to a 2009 Pew study, 51 percent of Internet users now post online content that they have created themselves, and one in ten Americans posts something online every day.
Of course, increased participation means an increase in the equivalent of what we used to call flame wars, or generally rude behavior, as well as a proliferation of false information and gathering places for people to plan and encourage hurtful activities. Some people think this ruins the Web, but I disagree. It’s what happens when everyone is there.
Interestingly, while the Edge question was innovative in format when it started, the Edge Website still does not allow readers to comment on the opinions offered. I’m not saying that this is either a good or a bad thing. The Edge Foundation’s goal is to increase public understanding of science by encouraging intellectuals to “express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.” I just wonder whether it isn’t time to embrace the new Internet and let that public write back.
The Extinction of Experience
Scott D. Sampson
Dinosaur paleontologist and science communicator; author, Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life
Like that of many others, my personal experience is that the Internet is both the Great Source for information and the Great Distractor, fostering compulsions to stay connected, often at the expense of other, arguably more valuable aspects of life. I don’t think the Internet alters the way I think as much as it does the way I work; having the Great Source close at hand is irresistible, and I generally keep a window open on my laptop for random searches that pop into my head.
Nevertheless, I’m much less concerned about “tweeners,” who, like me, grew up before the Internet, than I am about children of the Internet age, the so-called digital natives. I want to know how the Internet changes the way they think. The jury is still out. Although the supporting research may still be years away, it seems likely that a lifetime of daily conditioning dictated by the rapid flow of information across glowing screens will generate substantial changes in brains and thus in thinking. Commonly cited potential effects include fragmented thinking and shorter attention spans, with a concomitant reduction in reflection (let alone interest), introspection, and in-depth thought. Another oft-noted concern is the nature of our communications, which are becoming increasingly terse and decreasingly face-to-face.
But I have a larger fear, one rarely mentioned in these discussions— the extinction of experience. This term, which comes from author and naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, refers to the loss of intimate experience with the natural world. Clearly, anyone who spends ten-plus hours each day focused on a screen is not devoting much time to experiencing the “real” world. More and more, it seems, real-life experience is being replaced by virtual alternatives. And—to my mind, at least—this is a grave problem.
As the first generation to contemplate the fact that humanity may have a severely truncated future, we
live at arguably the most pivotal moment in the substantial history of Homo sapiens. Decisions made and actions taken during the next generation will have an imbalanced effect on the future of humans and all other life on Earth. If we blunder onward on our present course—increasing populations, poverty, greenhouse gas emissions, and habitat destruction—we face no less than the collapse of civilization and the destruction of the biosphere. Given the present dire circumstances, any new far-reaching cultural phenomenon must be evaluated in terms of its ability to help or hinder the pressing work to be done; certainly this concern applies to how the Internet influences thinking.
Ecological sustainability, if it is to occur, will include greener technologies and lifestyles. In addition, however, we require a shift in worldview that reconfigures our relationship with nonhuman nature. To give one prominent example of our current dysfunctional perspective, how are we to achieve sustainability as long as we see nature as part of the economy rather than the inverse? Instead of being a collection of resources available for our exploitation, nature must become a community of relatives worthy of our respect and a teacher to whom we look for inspiration and insight. In contrast to the present day, sustainable societies will likely be founded on local foods, local materials, and local energy. They will be run by people who have a strong passion for place and a deep understanding of the needs of those places. And I see no way around the fact that this passion and understanding will be grounded in direct, firsthand experiences with those places.
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? Page 22