Notes and Thoughts
Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?
A guy named Nicholas Carr has written a book asserting that the Internet has changed the way our brains work–it’s making us less able to concentrate, he claims.
The first time I heard his thesis, I kinda’ rebelled against it. I heard him on Fresh Air, the NPR interview program, and I agreed with interviewer Terry Gross, who kept suggesting that maybe we’re not getting stupider but smart in a different way.
Carr, however, came back with two points. First, he said, he found he was less and less able to read a book straight through; and second, he couldn’t formulate coherent thoughts by reading on the Internet in that typical Internet-way—skittering from website to website.
I must say I thought back to those points the other night when my friend Scott was gushing on about Apple’s new reader, the i-Tablet or whatever it’s called. The best thing about it, he said, was that you could load twenty books at a time, and as soon as you got tired of one book, you could go to another and the machine would remember where you were in every one.
Of course, you don’t have to read twenty books at once, just because you can. But I tell you, with technology, it seems to me, whatever you can do is hard to resist doing. Technology doesn’t just open up more choices; it also mandates behavior.
Gross said that maybe those who have grown up with the new technology are going to be able to function with it and to formulate thought in ways that we older folks are neurally locked out of. While I was listening to her, I thought she was making a damned good point. And I still do.
Carr, however, countered that when we read on the Internet, we read “shallow.” We keep departing from a given line of thought to chase tangents. When we hyperlink away into hyperspace, we get a broad array of information and ideas, but we skim from the top of every topic. Skimming lets us spot the connection between two very disparate ideas; but it prevents us from relating two ideas that are connected in a very complicated way.
So I’m thinking Gross has a point, but Carr has a point too. Reading intelligently consists of constructing meaning. Back in the old-days, when we read in the old-fashioned way, starting at page one and moving on to page-last, we gave ourselves up to someone else’s construction of meaning. We came to know a structure of meaning that someone had taken a lot of time to put together. If we constantly broke away from the author’s sustained line of thought, we simply wouldn’t get the point, because there are some concepts one simply cannot form unless one follows a long line of argument. When we surf the Internet, by contrast, we’re collecting data that we need to construct meaning of our own, on the spot. And the structure we end up with may look grandiose, but it’s constructed of the most readily accessible bits of information. It’s a Taj Mahal made of straw.
I began to take Carr’s thesis more seriously when I came across a devastating related point. According to studies cited in Washington Post, kids now prefer to text than talk because it’s more efficient. I’ve seen this with my 19-year-old daughter Elina. I also see that lots of people have started interacting mainly on Facebook—that is, purely with text. The Post article points out that text doesn’t have the subtle additional information that comes from vocal inflections, facial expressions and the like. It also doesn’t have all the normal interactive stuff that happens between two people talking.
Two people talking is a bio-chemical event. The empathy that builds up is biological. When two people interact purely through text, the actual interaction is between a biological organism and a static object. The person who is presumably at the other end of the static object is an intellectual abstraction, based on the living organism’s internally-maintained conceptual framework.
Here’s where that rubber meets the road. On some standard personality tests, the Post reports, college kids today are registering 40% less capacity for empathy. Statistics can be iffy but a 40% drop! That’s not a borderline change. Something is happening.
And it’s not surprising.
It fits right in with the idea that empathy for a static object vested with personality through a feat of intellectual abstraction is going to be less instinctually passionate than empathy for a biological co-organism with whom one is in living interaction.
I say all this with a caveat: I msyelf spend 90 % of my waking hours in front of my computer, and if this device were a human being, it would be far and away my best friend.
This is a lovely article, Tamim! Thank you. I read Carr’s article and had the same conflicted reaction to it. A couple thoughts:
The statistic you cite from the Post is chilling. Do you have a link or citation?
The metaphor of the Taj Mahal of straw is lovely, but I wonder if it’d be closer to Carr’s point to say a Taj Mahal made of legos. To me the point is that e-thinking involves taking an easier route, letting work already done by others substitute for some of the work the builders of the real Taj Mahal did for themselves.
There’s also an interesting parallel to the concept of alienation in market societies, namely that when people see value for price as the primary lens through which they view an interaction it reduces the humanity of the interaction. Market interactions can, at times, be brutal in much the same way that email “flames” can be.
As always, Tamim, what you say is insightful and eloquent. As an avid reader (and user of Google, but not Facebook or Twitter), there is something else about reading that you just don’t get in any kind of surfing. Surfing is frenetic, an effort to compress time and be efficient. But as James Gleick argues in his wonderful book Faster, this obsession with using every second to be fast may give us the illusion of saving time, but really doesn’t. All the Twitters or need to be on our cell phone all the time cost us time in all the Twitter responses or calls we have to answer, even at our peril (when driving or walking across the street, for instance). So we end up feeling more pressed, looking for more ways to save time, going faster to stay even. Reading a book is a time to slow down, move outside yourself, not worry about the passage of time or lose track of its altogether in a great book. How wonderful that is!
Well said, Tamim. As a person who works virtually and is at the computer some 12 hours a day, I find myself in a love/hate relationship with the computer. I use it to work, to create, and to stay in touch with friends, but I find moments where I just want to throw it out the window entirely and move to the woods and SLOW DOWN. I dig in my heels at times … I sometimes don’t access the computer on weekends. I still read BOOKS and don’t have a Kindle. I still read the daily newspaper and take the NY Times on Sundays. That makes me … old and/or stubborn and/or deluded …. Oh well!
I haven’t bought a Kindle yet. I have a stack of books waiting to be read and promised myself I would read them all before buying a reading device.
I usually read 2 or 3 books at time. They can also remember where I was because of paper bookmarkers.
I have another concern about kids and their intensive use of SMS/Facebook/Twitter: they spell terribly wrong afterwards.