Commentary
Is The Internet Making Us Stupid -- Or A New Kind of Smart?
- by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, September 9, 2010
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I'm reading Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows." His basic premise is that our current environment, with its deluge of available information typically broken into bite-sized pieces served up online, is "dumbing down" our brains. We no longer read, we scan. We forego the intellectual heavy lifting of prolonged reading for the more immediate gratification of information foraging. We're becoming a society of attention-deficit dolts.
It's a grim picture, and Carr does a good job of backing up his premise. I've written about many of these issues in the past. And I don't dispute the trends that Carr chronicles (at length). But is Carr correct is saying that online is dulling our intellectual capabilities, or is it just creating a different type of intelligence?
While I'm at it, I suspect this new type of intelligence is much more aligned with our native abilities than the "book smarts" that have ruled the day for the last five centuries. I'm an avid reader (ironically, I've been reading Carr's book on an iPad) and I'm the first to say that I would be devastated if reading goes the way of the dodo. But are we projecting our view of what's "right" on a future where the environment (and rules) have changed?
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A Timeline of Intellect
If you expand your perspective of human intellectualism to the entire history of man, you find that the past 500 years have been an anomaly. Prior to the invention of the printing press (and the subsequent blossoming of intellectualism) our brains were there for one purpose: to keep us alive. The brain accomplished this critical objective through one of three ways:
Responding to Danger in Our Environments
Reading is an artificial human activity. We have to train our brains to do it. But scanning our surroundings to notice things that don't fit is as natural to us as sleeping and eating. We have sophisticated, multi-layered mechanisms to help us recognize anomalies in our environment (which often signal potential danger). I believe we have "exapted" these same mechanisms and use them every day to digest information presented online.
This idea goes back to something I have said repeatedly: Technology doesn't change behavior, it enables behavior to change. Change comes from us pursuing the most efficient route for our brains. When technology opens up an option that wasn't previously available, and the brain finds this a more natural path to take, it will take it. It may seem that the brain is changing, but in actuality it's returning to its evolutionary "baseline."
If the brain has the option of scanning, using highly efficient inherent mechanisms that have been created through evolution over thousands of generations, or reading, using jury-rigged, inefficient neural pathways that we've been forced to build from scratch through our lives, the brain will take the easiest path. The fact was, we couldn't scan a book. But we can scan a Web site.
Making The Right Choices
Another highly honed ability of the brain is to make advantageous choices. We can consider alternatives using a combination of gut instincts (more than you know) and rational deliberation (less than you think) and more often than not, make the right choice. This ability goes in lock step with the previous one, scanning our environment.
Reading a book offers no choices. It's a linear experience, forced to go in one direction. It's an experience dictated by the writer, not the reader. But browsing a Web site is an experience littered with choices. Every link is a new choice, made by the visitor. This is why we (at my company) have continually found that a linear presentation of information (for example, a Flash movie) is a far less successful user experience than a Web site where the user can choose from logical and intuitive navigation options.
Carr is right when he says this is distracting, taking away from the focused intellectual effort that typifies reading. But I counter with the view that scanning and making choices is more naturally human than focused reading.
Establishing Beneficial Social Networks
Finally, humans are herders. We naturally create intricate social networks and hierarchies, because it's the best way of ensuring that our DNA gets passed along from generation to generation. When it comes to gene propagation, there is definitely safety in numbers.
Reading is a solitary pursuit. Frankly, that's one of the things avid readers treasure most about a good book, the "me" time that it brings with it. That's all well and good, but bonding and communication are key drivers of human behavior. Unlike a book, online experiences offer you the option of solitary entertainment or engaged social connection. Again, it's a closer fit with our human nature.
From a personal perspective, I tend to agree with most of Carr's arguments. They are a closer fit with what I value in terms of intellectual "worth." But I wonder if we fall into a trap of narrowed perspective when we pass judgment on what's right and what's not based on what we've known, rather than on what's likely to be.
At the end of the day, humans will always be human.
Paula
I'm not sure. One thing I think that is left unstated in Carr's book is the potential societal outcomes of this rewiring. Again, if you look at the evolutionary drives there is always the possibility that greed could drive us even further down a path of ethical ambiguity and overt consumerism. I'm not discounting Carr's warnings, just trying to provide a little balance to them. Humans being human is not a guarantee of good things to come.
Well played Gord. I always thought that Carr's "Shallows" was a bit shallow, in that it may be trying to put blame on technology. Technology IS an enabler, and if it enables changing behaviors or new behaviors altogether, odds are good that those changes may be beneficial. Only time will tell, and the "fittest" behaviors for success will survive.
Although I haven't read the book, I do "read" my students every day. There is no doubt in my mind that they will always find the path of least resistance - however, that path is often the poorest choice.
It sounds like part of your reasoning is that nearly all information can be learned by scanning and browsing. It seems to me that certain information is best learned like this, but there are still many topics that can only be fully understood by careful, thoughtful, and deliberate reading.
I agree with your premises, Gord, and suggest that it is in every generation's nature to take exception to how the next does things. Beyond this, far from being 'dumber' than our long-reading (or illiterate, which was actually the majority until far less than 500 years ago) ancestors, we simply have a gigantic volume of common knowledge that did not exist before pan-and-scan, which began with the television; the exercise of changing channels is a more linear and arduous form of scanning a complex web site landing page.
Not only do we each carry a host of theme songs, actor names, movie titles and plots, television series finales, news broadcasts, and helpful tips for living in our heads, we trivially know a lot of quite scientific things that were completely unknown to the common person 400 years ago, regarding for instance the planets and their basic composition, the basics of genetics, simple atomic physics, reproduction, the causes of colds and simple ways to live reasonably sanitary lives. People of earlier times were no smarter or stupider than we, they simply had a very different mind map of what constituted 'common knowledge'. People who can only learn by sitting down and reading plaintext for six hours have always, always been the exception, and in no case can I imagine that's the most efficient way to learn anything. But reading a novel is completely a different thing - it's not about learning, it's about entertainment anyway.
"Intellectualism"? ...And it's only "500 years old"! hmmmm...
Quick fact & reality check suggests we can actually look back a few thousand plus years to the first Greek philosophers, then onto the Roman thinkers and up through Aquinas, Augustine before we get to the pre-modern classic thinkers.
All these foundational "intellectuals" of course building in gathering crescendos toward the great rush of ideas & synthesis of thinking ignited by the Enlightenment ... and finally on into the tectonic shift that rocked the modern and post-modern house these past 80 years or so with the nuclear theorists and those nutty but sincere existentialists and now - with not a little relevance to your guys and his "intellectualists" - the ever-diverse & multi-disciplined Darwinist gangs --- best poster boys for my money being the awesome evolutionary psychology crowd.
Let me recommend your next read, Gord, one I prescribe for my integrated marketing students --- The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby et al).
It might not have the pop resonance of the Carr work (in fact put the coffee on cuz it shades towards dry at times...) but I think it might offer you more actionable insights when it comes to doing what we're all here to figure out --- how to make people change or repeat their behaviors that drive the businesses and the brands we market.
@tkennon | bigevidence.blogspot.com
Thanks Thom..added to my reading list.
Intellectualism has been around much longer, but the fact is, it didn't reach the masses until the advent of the modern printing press. That was my point. Neuroplasticity in a few vs the many.
I agree with Kenn's point. I remember my classmates always trying to find the easiest path. It is not the Internet's fault.
Gord,
If the greed and powerful grows exponentially, then the powerless can lose at the same speed. What's left of the plebian classes ? Now, if only 2% of this country controls the uber money masses, what then? Smarter or more stupid to allow it ?
It's not making us stupid, nor is it increasing the overall percentage of the truly stupid. But it is offering that percentage an opportunity to expose their stupidity online.
The upside being that it's now much easier to keep track of them all, so when the re-education camps are finally operational, rounding them all up will be a piece of cake.
The schools are out of synch with the Internet era. The emphasis in learning has been in stuffing data into our heads for immediate retrieval. We don't have to do that now, because we have instant access to data on the Internet. That frees up a lot of our brains for higher level activity. The skills kids need to get know involve knowing how to access information and what to do with it.