But—as a larger variety of thoughts and images pass by, as I search a thought and see the number of people who have had the same thought before me, as more and more systems talk to one another and take care of all kinds of logistics—I do think this level of connectedness has pushed us, beneficially, toward both the original and the local.
We can go original, either in creation or curation, and carve a new little path in the ant hill, or we can copy one of all the things out there and bring it home to our local group. Some ants manage to be original enough to benefit the whole anthill, but other ants can copy and modify the good stuff and bring it home. And in this marching back and forth, trying to get things done, communicate, make sense of things, I look not to leaders but to curators, who can efficiently signal where to find the good stuff.
What is made accessible to me through the Internet might not be changing how I think, but it does some of my thinking for me. Above all, the Internet is changing how I see myself. As real-world activity and connections continue to be what matters most to me, the Internet, with its ability to record my behavior, is making it clearer that I am, in thought and in action, the sum of the thoughts and actions of other people to a greater extent than I have realized.
I Can Make a Difference Because of the Internet
Bruce Hood
Director, Bristol Cognitive Development Centre, Experimental Psychology Department, University of Bristol, U.K.; author, SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable
Who has not Googled himself ? Most humans have a concept of self constructed in terms of how we think we’re perceived by those around us, and the Internet has made that preoccupation trivially easy. Now people can assess their impact factor through a multitude of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, blogging.
Last year, at the request of my publisher, I started a blog to comment on weird and bizarre examples of supernatural thinking from around the world. At the outset, I thought blogging was a self- indulgent activity, but I agreed to give it a whirl to help promote my book. In spite of my initial reluctance, I soon became addicted to feedback. It was not enough to post blogs for some unseen audience. I needed validation from visitors that my efforts and opinions were appreciated. Within weeks, I had become a numbers junkie looking for more and more hits.
However, the Internet has also made me aware of both my insignificance and my power. Within the blogosphere, I am no longer an expert on any opinion, since it can be shared or rejected by a multitude of others. But insignificant individuals can make a significant difference when they coalesce around a cause. As I write this, a British company is under public scrutiny for allegedly selling bogus bomb-detecting dowsing rods to the Iraqi security forces. This scrutiny has come about because of a blog campaign by like-minded skeptics, who used the Internet to draw attention to what they considered to be questionable business activity. Such a campaign would have been difficult in the pre-Internet days and not something that the ordinary man in the street would have taken on. In this way, the Internet empowers the individual. I can make a difference because of the Internet. I’ll be checking back on Google to see if anyone shares my opinion.
Go Virtual, Young Man
Eric Weinstein
Mathematician and economist; principal, Natron Group
Oddly, the Internet is still invisible, to the point where many serious thinkers continue to doubt whether it changes modern thought at all.
In science, we generally first learn about invisible structures from anomalies in concrete systems. The existence of an invisible neutrino on the same footing as visible particles was predicted in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli as the error term necessary to save the principles of conservation of energy and momentum in beta decay. Likewise, human memes invisible to DNA (e.g., tunes) were proposed in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, since selection, to remain valid, must include all self-replicating units of transmission involved in tradeoffs with traditional genes.
Following this line of thinking, it is possible that a generalized Internet may even be definable, with sufficient care, as a kind of failure of the physical world to close as a self-contained system. Were a modern Rip van Winkle sufficiently clever, he might eventually infer something like the existence of file-sharing networks from witnessing the collapse of music stores, CD sales, and the recording industry’s revenue model.
The most important example of this principle has to do with markets and geography. The Internet has forced me to view physical and intellectual geography as instances of an overarching abstraction coexisting on a common footing. As exploration and trade in traditional physical goods such as spices, silk, and gold have long been linked, it is perhaps unsurprising that the marketplace of ideas should carry with it an intellectual geography all its own. The cartography of what may be termed the Old World of ideas is well developed. Journals, prizes, and endowed chairs give us landmarks to which we turn in the quest for designated thinkers, and for those wishing to hug the shore of the familiar, this proves a great aid.
Despite being relatively stable, the center of this scientific world began to shift in the last century from institutions in Europe to ones in North America. While there is currently a great deal of talk about a second shift, from the United States toward Asia, it may instead happen that the next great migration will be dominated by flight to structures in the virtual from those moored to the physical.
Consider the award in 2006 of the Fields Medal (the highest prize in mathematics) for a solution of the Poincaré Conjecture. This was remarkable in that the research being recognized was not submitted to any journal. In choosing to decline the medal, peer review, publication, and employment, the previously obscure Grigori Perelman chose to entrust the legacy of his great triumph solely to an Internet archive intended as a temporary holding tank for papers awaiting publication in established journals. In so doing, he forced the recognition of a new reality by showing that it was possible to move an indisputable intellectual achievement out of the tradition of referee-gated journals bound to the stacks of university libraries into a new and poorly charted virtual sphere of the intellect.
But while markets may drive exploration, the actual settlement of the frontier at times requires the commitment of individuals questing for personal freedom, and here the New World of the Internet shines. It is widely assumed that my generation failed to produce towering figures like Francis Crick, P. A. M. Dirac, Alexander Grothendieck, or Paul Samuelson because something in the nature of science had changed. I do not subscribe to that theory. Suffice it to say that issues of academic freedom have me longing to settle among the noble homesteaders now gathering on the efficient frontier of the marketplace of ideas. My intellectual suitcases have been packed for months now, as I try to screw up the courage and proper “efficient frontier mentality” to follow my own advice to the next generation: “Go virtual, young man.”
My Internet Mind
Thomas A. Bass
Professor of English, University at Albany, State University of New York; author, The Spy Who Loved Us
What do I do with the Internet? I send out manuscripts and mail, buy things, listen to music, read books, hunt up information and news. The Internet is a great stew of opinion and facts. It is an encyclopedic marvel that has transformed my world. It has also undoubtedly transformed the way I think.
But if we humans are the sex organs of our technologies, reproducing them, expanding their domains and functionality—as Marshall McLuhan said—then perhaps I should turn the question upside down. Because of my reliance on the Internet, the number of hours each day I spend in its electronic embrace, have I begun to think like the Internet? Do I have an Internet mind that has been transformed by my proximity to this network of networks?
How does the Internet think? What does it want of me, as I go about distractedly meeting its demands? Again to cite McLuhan, this time quoting in full the passage that describes my outed brain and airborne nerves:
Electronic technology requires ut
ter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all the other extensions of his physical organs.
I have used the word distracted to describe my Internet mind. We all know the feeling of being jumpy, edgy, nervous around the Net. Time is speeding up. Space is contracting. Sentences are getting shorter. Thoughts are swifter—dare we say shallower? Again, McLuhan got the jump on us. Fifty years ago, he announced, “Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.” Our “electric implosion” has ushered in an “age of anxiety.”
This distracted state will end, said McLuhan, when our machines begin to think on their own. They will be smarter than us, as they already are in lots of ways, such as calculating numbers and flying airplanes. “Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well.” This final handoff from man to machine will allow us to “program consciousness,” said McLuhan.
Luckily for those of us who, when we check the headlines, sometimes find our mouse hovering over a picture of the latest celebrity scandal, the computer consciousness currently evolving beyond our human minds will be more dignified. McLuhan assured us that this new consciousness would be free of “the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.”
A Catholic mystic touched by the spiritual optimism of Teilhard de Chardin, McLuhan foresaw a glorious end to my acquisition of an Internet mind. “The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity,” he said. With computers functioning as translating machines, allowing me “to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness,” I will be ushered eventually into “a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.” In the meantime, excuse me while I go check the headlines, pay some bills, and try not to click on too many of today’s top-ten distractions.
“If You Have Cancer, Don’t Go on the Internet”
Karl Sabbagh
Writer and television producer; author, Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us
When the British playwright Harold Pinter developed cancer of the esophagus, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, discovered online that there was a 92 percent mortality rate. “If you have cancer, don’t go on the Internet,” she told the Sunday Times in January 2010.
This set me thinking about my own interactions with the Internet and how they might differ fundamentally from my use of other sources of information.
Lady Antonia could, I suppose, have said, “If you have cancer, don’t look at the Merck Manual,” or some other medical guide, but there must be more to it than that. First of all, there’s the effortlessness of going on the Internet. I used to joke that if I had a query that could be answered either by consulting a book in the shelves on the other side of my study or by using the Internet, it would be quicker and less energy-consuming to find the answer on the Internet. That’s not funny anymore, because it’s obviously the most efficient way to do things. I’m one of the few people who trust Wikipedia; its science entries, in particular, are extremely thorough, reliable, and well sourced. People who trust books (two or more years out of date) rather than Wikipedia are like people who balk at buying on the Internet for security reasons but happily pay with a credit card in restaurants, where an unscrupulous waiter can keep the carbon copy of your slip and run up huge bills before you know it.
Lady Antonia’s remark was really a tribute to the reliability and comprehensiveness of the Internet. Probably it wasn’t so much that she came across a pessimistic prognosis as that she came across a presumably reliable one, based on up-to-date information. That doesn’t, of course, mean it was accurate. She may not have consulted all cancer sites, or it may be that no one really knows for sure what the prognosis is for esophageal cancer. But she assumed—and I, too, assume when using the Internet—that with a little skill and judgment you can get more reliable information there than anywhere else.
This, of course, has nothing to do with thinking. It could be that I would think the same if I’d been writing my books with a quill pen and had only the Bible, Shakespeare, and Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary to consult. But the Internet certainly constrains what I think about. It stops me from thinking any more about that great idea for a book that I now find was published a few years ago by a small university press in Montana.
It also reinforces my belief in my own ideas and opinions, because it is now much quicker to test them, particularly when they are new opinions. By permitting anyone to publish anything, the Internet allows me to read the whole range of views on a topic and infer from the language used the reasonableness or otherwise of the views. Of course, I was inclined to disbelieve in Intelligent Design before I had access to the wide range of wacky and hysterical Websites that promote it. But now I have no doubts at all that the theory is tosh (slang, chiefly brit nonsense; rubbish —The Free Dictionary).
But this is still not to do with thinking. What do I do all day, sitting at my computer? I string words together, reread them, judge them, improve them if necessary, and print them out or send them to people. And underlying this process is a judgment about what is interesting, novel, or in need of explanation—and the juggling of words in my mind to express these concepts in a clear way. None of that, as far as I am aware, has changed because of the Internet.
But this is to deal with only one aspect of the Internet: its provision of factual content. There are also e-mail and attachments and blogs and software downloads and YouTube and Facebook and shopping and banking and weather forecasts and Google Maps and and and . . . But before all this, I knew there were lots of people in the world capable of using language and saying clever or stupid things. Now I have access to them in a way I didn’t before—but, again, this is just information provision rather than a change in ways of thinking.
Perhaps the crucial factor is speed. When I was setting out to write a book, I would start with a broad outline and a chapter breakdown, and these would lead me to set a series of research tasks that could take months: look in this library, write to this expert, look for this book, find this document. Now the order of things has changed. While I was doing all the above, which could take weeks or months, my general ideas for the book would be evolving. My objectives might change and my research tasks with them. I would do more broad-brush thinking. Now, when documents can be found and downloaded in seconds, library catalogs consulted from one’s desk, experts e-mailed, and a reply received within twenty-four hours, the idea is set in stone much earlier.
But even here, there is no significant difference in thinking. If in the course of the research some document reveals a different angle, that this happens within hours or days rather than months can only be to the good. The broad-brush thinking is now informed rather than uninformed.
I give up. The Internet hasn’t changed how I think. It’s only a tool. An electric drill wouldn’t change how many holes I make in a piece of wood; it would only make the hole-drilling easier and quicker. A car doesn’t change the nature and purpose of a journey I make to the nearest town; it only makes it quicker and leads to me making more journeys than if I walked.
But what about Lady Antonia Fraser? Is the truth-telling power of the Internet something to avoid? The fact is, the Internet reveals in its full horror the true nature of humankind—its obsessions, the triviality of its interests, its scorn for logic or rationality, its inhumanity, the power of capital, the intolerance of the other. But anyone who says this is news just doesn’t get out enough. The Internet magnifies and specifies what we know already about human nature—or if we don’t know it, we’re naïve. T
he only way my thinking could have been changed by this “revelation” would have been if I believed, along with Dr. Pangloss, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And I don’t.
Incomprehensible Visitors from the Technological Future
Alison Gopnik
Psychologist, University of California, Berkeley; author, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
My thinking has certainly been transformed in alarming ways by a relatively recent information technology, but it’s not the Internet. I often sit for hours in the grip of this compelling medium, motionless and oblivious, instead of interacting with the people around me. As I walk through the streets, I compulsively check out even trivial messages (movie ads, street signs), and I pay more attention to descriptions of the world (museum captions, menus) than to the world itself. I’ve become incapable of using attention and memory in ways that previous generations took for granted.
Yes, I know, reading has given me a powerful new source of information. But is it worth the isolation, or the damage to dialog and memorization that Socrates foresaw? Studies show, in fact, that I’ve become involuntarily compelled to read; I can’t keep myself from decoding letters. Reading has even reshaped my brain: Cortical areas that once were devoted to vision and speech have been hijacked by print. Instead of learning through practice and apprenticeship, I’ve become dependent on lectures and textbooks. And look at the toll of dyslexia and attention disorders and learning disabilities—all signs that our brains were not designed to deal with such a profoundly unnatural technology.
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? Page 24