Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  The Internet’s global agenda is counterpoised to the real-world conditions of my geographic localism. Community has become a fluidly negotiable term because of the Internet. However it is conceived, though, community online is radically different from community in a geographically local sense. Second Life offers an extreme example of the former; opposed to this is the way local churches in my real world address community housing and schooling issues in my city. However, when these same churches reach out online, or even on TV, their function is diluted to meaninglessness.

  The Internet, by distracting me from local matters of immediate and actionable significance, has destructively interfered with my neighborhood agency. Nevertheless, to the degree that all politics is local, the Internet can be used to expand awareness and interactivity within and of a geographically limited function. It cost-effectively supplements direct-mail public relations, leading neighbors to events and connectedness that otherwise would slip past them. All of this is helpful, but it doesn’t account for the urgency with which people believe the Internet is a direct route to power for them, when in fact the Internet is so exploitable by power as a control mechanism. Meanwhile I’ve begun to think of power differently.

  In my West/North world, consensus formation has been atomized as a by-product of Net surfing. I can turn anywhere and find confirmation or contestation of almost anything I happen to have in mind. The intimacy of Internet peer group communications (Facebook, etc.) challenges the parents, tribes, churches, communities, workplaces, and schools whose authority formerly dominated the plane of large-scale belief formation and condensation. Meanwhile, in regions where Internet communication is more rare, more regulated, more obviously slanted, and Net surfing is less stochastic than in my West/North, religious conviction is more coherent and is linked to idioms of authority.

  A narrow information channel can pretend to be the parents, tribes, churches, communities, workplaces, and schools that for me are washed away by my surfing relativism. But the illusion of individual empowerment that Internet surfing thrusts upon me is simply the backwash of a tidal rise in the technologies of control, effected in two directions: power’s structuring of “freedom” of choice and exchange, and power’s concomitant harvesting of data with explicit aims to regulate my real-world behavior.

  Internet surfing completely absorbs me in the flux and flow of the present moment, in contrast to reading a book, or learning a machine, or studying with a teacher. These enterprises demand sustained, linear thinking. But my students don’t think they need to read a whole book to respond to any given challenge; they can simply go to the Internet and a search engine will “think outside the box” for them. This has made me despondent about a general degradation in people’s habituation to focused linear thinking.

  Today I opened an e-mail message that asked me how the Internet is changing the way I think. I’ve received thousands of phone calls but never gotten one that asked how the telephone has affected my thinking. I’ve read many books without ever coming across this question about books, at least put so directly. The same with speaking to friends or watching movies. Now, in general, I regard the rise of inventions such as the Internet from a constructivist perspective; in this instance, as a consequence of the built-out social needs—among capital and the military—for telegraphy, telephones, fax, and so forth. So what is it about the Internet, then? Which social necessity made it so singularly reflexive?

  Conceptual Compasses for Deeper Generalists

  Paul W. Ewald

  Professor of biology, Amherst College; author, Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancer, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments

  When I was a kid growing up in Illinois in the early sixties, my mother took me on weekly trips to the Wilmette Public Library. It was a well-stocked warren of interconnected sand-colored brick buildings that grew in increments as Wilmette morphed from farmland to modest houses interspersed with vacant lots, to an upwardly mobile bland Chicago suburb, and finally to a pricey bland Chicago suburb. My most vivid memory of those visits was the central aisle, flanked by thousands of books reflecting glints of “modern” fluorescent lights from their crackly plastic covers. I decided to read them all. I began taking out five books each weekend with the idea that I would exchange them for another five a week later and continue until the mission was accomplished. Fortunately for my adolescence, I soon realized a deflating fact: The Wilmette library was acquiring more than five books per week.

  The modern Internet has greatly increased the availability of information, both the valuable stuff and the flotsam. Using a conceptual compass, a generalist can navigate the flotsam to gain the depth of a specialist in many areas. The compass-driven generalist need no longer be dismissed as the Mississippi River—a mile wide and a foot deep.

  My current fixation offers an illustration. I’m trying to develop a unified understanding of the causes of cancer. This goal may seem like a pipe dream. Quick reference to the Internet seems to confirm this characterization. Plugging “cancer” into Google, I got 246 million hits, most of them probably flotsam. Plugging “cancer” into PubMed, I got 2.4 million scientific works. Some of these will be flotsam, but most have something of value. If I read ten papers per day every day, I could read all 2.4 million papers in 657 years. These numbers are discouraging, but it gets worse. PubMed tells me that in 2009 there were 280 articles on cancer published per day. Memories of the Wilmette Public Library loom large.

  I navigate through this storm of information using my favorite conceptual compass: Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Application of evolutionary principles often draws attention to paradoxes and flaws in arguments. These problems, if recognized, are often swept under the rug, but they become unavoidably conspicuous when the correct alternative argument is formulated. One of my research strategies is to identify medical conventional wisdom that is inconsistent with evolutionary principles. Next I formulate alternative explanations that are consistent, and then I evaluate all of them with evidence.

  In the case of cancer, expert opinion has focused on mutations that transform well-behaved cells into rogue cells. This emphasis (bias?) has been so narrow that experts have dismissed other factors as exceptions to the rule. But it raises a paradox: The chance of getting the necessary mutations without destroying the viability of the cell seems much too low to account for the widespread occurrence of cancers. Paramount among the cancer-inducing mutations are those that disrupt regulatory processes that have evolved to prevent damage from cancer and other diseases’ cell proliferation. One of these barriers to cancer is the arrest of cellular replication. Another is a cap on the total number of cell divisions. Still another is the tendency for cells to commit suicide when genetic damage is detected.

  For a century, research has shown that infections can cause cancer. For most of this time, this knowledge was roundly dismissed as applying only to nonhuman animals. Over the past thirty years, however, the connection between infection and human cancer has become ever stronger. In the 1970s, most cancer experts concluded that infection could be accepted as a cause of no more than 1 percent of human cancer. Today, infectious causes are generally accepted for about 20 percent of human cancer, and there’s no end in sight for this trend.

  When infections were first found to cause cancer, experts adjusted their perspective by the path of least resistance. They assumed that infections contribute to cancer because they increase mutation rates. An alternative view is that infectious agents evolve to sabotage the barriers to cancer. Why? Because barriers to cancer are also barriers to persistence within a host, particularly for viruses. By causing the cells they live in to divide in a precancerous state, viruses can survive and replicate below the immunological radar.

  The depth of biological knowledge and the ability of the Internet to access this depth allows even a generalist to evaluate these two alternative explanations. Every cancer-causing virus that has been well studied is known to sabotage these barriers.
Additional mutations (some of them perhaps induced by infection) then finish the transformation to cancer.

  Which viruses evolve persistence? This question is of critical practical importance, because we are probably in the midst of determining the full scope of infection-induced cancer. Evolving an ability to commandeer host cells and drive them into a precancerous state is quite a feat, especially for viruses, which tend to have only a dozen or so genes. To evolve mechanisms of persistence, viruses probably need a long time, or very strong selective pressures over a short period of time. Evolutionary considerations suggest that transmission by sex or high-contact kissing could generate such strong selection, because the long intervals between changes in sex or kissing partners (for most people) places a premium on persistence within an individual. The literature on human cancer viruses confirms this idea—almost all are transmitted by kissing or by sex.

  The extent to which this information improves quality and quantity of life will depend on whether people get access to it and alter their behavior to reduce their risk. The earlier the better, because exposure to these viruses rises dramatically soon after puberty. Luckily, kids now have broad access to information before they have access to sexual partners. It will be tougher for the rest of us, who grew up before the modern Internet, in the primitive decades of the twentieth century.

  Art Making Going Rural

  James Croak

  Artist

  When the Sui Dynasty sent the literati, the scholar-gentry, to teach Confucian classics to the unschooled in China’s farmlands, they dragged carts of calligraphy and paintings to isolated hamlets throughout the vast countryside. For centuries, it was how culture was dispersed in China and among some islands of Japan. Today they would drag a cable.

  The Internet allowed me to move to the countryside and make sculpture in the open snowy woods instead of the dark canyons of New York City. I resided in urban centers, especially New York, for most of my adult life, but in my spare time I was drawn to rural places: sojourns to the Gulf of Mexico, sabbaticals to the Rockies, treks into the Arizona desert among the saguaro and devil’s claw. Those places never seemed to be suitable for work—too isolated—until the Internet.

  I always loved raw nature, but I saw it as antithetical to contributing to the cultural world that centers in a large city. But a gradual thing happened while I was situated in that nexus, Manhattan: The Internet grew up around me. Trips to the library became trips to my screen; art house movies gave way to, well, trips to my screen, where YouTube and Netflix provide a private movie house living on my desk. The daily lift ride to my postal box became several trips to the screen each day, as fountain pens and stamps gave way to instant chatter among friends and not-friends. Taxi rides to supply shops gave way to Internet orders; let UPS lug it home. Negotiating the racks of neighborhood bookstores gave way to browsing Amazon with its reams of attached reviews. The pluriform reasons to live in a metropolis were appearing on my desk and not out past my doorman.

  The dawning happened during a photo trip to the Everglades. I took my computer with me—not just the phone or a dim laptop, but the big screen—to a strip motel whose swinging sign bragged “Internet” in perhaps the best Palmer script ever painted in peacock blue. There atop the lauan was the same view that I had in NYC: the New York Times Website, an FTP site, rows of e-mail, my bank’s Website with a new charge for Conch Shell Fantasy swallowed an hour earlier. Our common nervous system had followed me into the sea of grass, and I knew right then that I would follow that blinking cable farther into the countryside.

  Robert Frost wrote about arriving in a place in the woods so deep even his horse was puzzled:

  He gives his harness bells a shake

  To ask if there is some mistake.

  The only other sound’s the sweep

  Of easy wind and downy flake.

  I did follow that cable into the country, among trees not felled for newspapers not printed because home delivery is the Web. In keeping with this revelation, a Kindle will come next. My shelves cluttered with a lifetime of collected books will not increase, at least not at the previous steady rate; instead they will give way to the electric tablet, as rewritable as the clay tablets of Babylon but with a magic cuneiform from the Wi-Fi spirit that hovers in the air and inscribes stories for me to read. I need only petition this Wi-Fi for a story or a daily newspaper and the reed begins carving within sixty seconds. Rewritable tablet to fixed paper to rewritable tablet in only 6,000 years, and all three can be read under a tree.

  Can one telecommute as a sculptor? I send images of new pieces to my dealer; we discuss where they might land. As sculpture is not flat, it cannot be confused with a blunted JPEG as perhaps painting can, a qualitative flattening that worries painters. Larger works can be created simply because I have more space in the country. Living in Manhattan, I thought in terms of square feet; in the country, I think in terms of acres. After e-mail, my most basic Internet task is using the Net as a photo library, often eliminating the need to track down and hire life models. Need an eleven-year-old wearing a long bathing suit, twisting to the left, with hands in the air? Give me two minutes and I will have it, often from multiple angles, printed out and stapled to the wall of my studio. Internet means figurative accuracy.

  It also means dialog among like-minded people. I presently have four banters—e-mail threads—under way with art or architecture students in as many countries. Students are not bashful about sending notes out of the blue requesting recipes for making this or that, or advice on education or on how to prevail as an artist, et cetera. I answer most, out of a curiosity about what is on the next generation’s mind, hoping to keep my own mind pliable. The barriers preventing the student from reaching out to the experienced have fallen—no longer a letter passed from publisher to dealer to artist over a month or two but instead a note read at breakfast and a response by lunch.

  For me, the Internet has made art making rural, not centered in cities as it had been for centuries.

  The Cat Is Out of the Bag

  Max Tegmark

  Physicist, MIT; researcher, Precision Cosmology; scientific director, Foundational Questions Institute

  I have a love-hate relationship with the Internet. Maintaining the Zen-like focus so crucial for doing science was easier back when the newspaper and the mail came only once a day. Indeed, as a part of an abstinence-based rehab program, I now try to disconnect completely from the Internet while thinking, closing my mail program and Web browser for hours, much to the chagrin of colleagues and friends, who expect instant response. To get fresh and original ideas, I typically need to go even further and turn off my computer.

  On the other hand, the Internet gives me more time for such Internet-free thinking, by eliminating second-millennium-style visits to libraries and stores. The Internet also lets me focus my thinking on the research frontier rather than on reinventing the wheel. Had the Internet existed in 1922 when Alexander Friedmann discovered the expanding-universe model, Georges Lemaître wouldn’t have had to rediscover it five years later.

  The Internet gives me not only traditionally available information faster (and sometimes faster than I can retrieve it from memory) but also previously unavailable information. With some notable exceptions, I find that “the truth, nothing but the truth, but maybe not the whole truth” is a useful rule of thumb for news reporting, and I usually find it both easy and amusing to piece together what actually happened by pretending I just arrived from Mars and comparing a spectrum of Websites from Fox News to Al Jazeera.

  The Internet also affects my thinking by leaving me thinking about the Internet. What will it do to us? On the flip side, as the master of distraction, it seems to be further reducing our collective attention span from the depths to which television brought it. Important issues fade from focus fast, and while many of humanity’s challenges get more complicated, society’s ability to pay attention to complex arguments dwindles. Sound bites and attack ads work well when the world has
attention deficit disorder.

  Nevertheless, the ubiquity of information is clearly having a positive effect in areas ranging from science and education to economic development. The essence of science is to think for oneself and question authority. I therefore delight in the fact that the Internet makes it harder to restrict information and block the truth. Once the cat is out of the bag and in the Cloud, that’s it. Today it’s hard even for Iran and China to prevent information dissemination. Soviet-style restrictions on copying machines sound quaint today, and the only currently reliable censorship is not to allow the Internet at all, as in North Korea.

  Love it or hate it, free information will transform the world. Oft-discussed examples range from third-world education to terrorist technology. As another example, suppose someone discovers and posts online a low-tech process for mass-producing synthetic cocaine, THC, or heroin from cheap and readily available chemicals—much like methamphetamine manufacturing today, except safer and cheaper. This would trigger domestic drug production in industrialized countries that no government could stop, in turn slashing prices and potentially devastating the revenue and the power of Colombian and Mexican drug cartels and the Taliban.

  Everyone Is an Expert

  Roger Schank

  Psychologist and computer scientist; founder, Engines for Education, Inc.; author, Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own

  The Internet has not changed the way I think, nor has it changed the way anyone else thinks. Thinking has always been the same. To simplify: The thinking process starts with an expectation or hypothesis, and thinking requires one to find (or make up) evidence that explains where that expectation went wrong and to decide upon explanations of one’s initial misunderstanding. The process hasn’t changed since caveman times. The important questions in this process are these: What constitutes evidence? How do you find it? How do you know if what you found is true? We construct explanations based on the evidence we have found. What has changed is how we find evidence, how we interpret the evidence we have found, and how we find available explanations from which to choose.