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Does the Internet Make Humanity Smarter Or Dumber?
Nemilar writes "The Wall Street Journal is running a pair of articles asking whether the Internet is making humanity smarter or dumber. The argument for smarter is that the Internet is simply a change in the rules of publishing, and that the bad material is thrown away; the second story critiques the 'information overload' aspect of the Internet, claiming that we have traded depth of knowledge for velocity and span. What do you think? Does the Internet make you stupid?"
Of course it can easily make you dumber, just like TV can make you dumber. The similitude has become to apply after 1995 when big players (telcos, etc.) became Internet providers and when companies and marketing agencies have become to realize to potential of Internet as a marketing tool and viewed it as just like another tool similar to TV.
Don't get me wrong, it is still possible to use the Internet to get smarter or at least more informed but given what I observe, it for the typical Joe user that uses it in a way comparable to a modern T.V. where you can play games running on the cable company hardware, it makes him dumber.
You could be surprised by how many people are proud to announce breaking news to me because they received an chain-email containing a ridiculous story that takes me about 30 seconds to debunk. The most worrying part is that they actually deeply believed it before sharing it with me.
Some people believe anything they watch on TV and read in newspaper. Nowadays, a lot of people believe anything they see on the Internet just like if they had seen it on TV.
Well to their defense, this is the way it was marketed and sold to them by the big players, just like an extension to TV with very low emphasis on educating people about the technology, security, etc.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
> What do you think?
I think false dichotomies make good headlines.
Check out dis funny picture of cat.
Actually I think it reveals our stupidity.
But the real issue here is that the article doesn't really address "Does the Internet Make Humanity Smarter Or Dumber?". Instead it should be entitled: "Does distraction, largely in part to the internet, make some individuals process information differently?". Sure distractions are always "bad":
When we're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.
But does a fragmented short term memory have permanent effects? He talks in the article about
In another experiment, recently conducted at Stanford University's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, a team of researchers gave various cognitive tests to 49 people who do a lot of media multitasking and 52 people who multitask much less frequently. The heavy multitaskers performed poorly on all the tests. They were more easily distracted, had less control over their attention, and were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia.
To me, what led those people to do media multitasking in the first place? Perhaps the media did not engineer some level of "multitaskness" (not a word, I know) but that this multi-tasking ability was inherent to those individuals' respective personalities. This brings be back to my first point that the internet reveals our stupidity AND perhaps just our personality in general.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Does the Internet Make Humanity Smarter Or Dumber?
I tire of constantly pushing the idea that the internet is a double edged sword. It liberates you to pursue your desires whether they be learning, information, socializing, games or porn. In this liberating spirit, I claim it is possibly the greatest revolution yet in regards to information.
... time management for people has been an issue going all the way back through human history. Why must we stop now and act like 100% of our time must be spent on the internet playing Farmville?
Now it's just your choice to use it as you desire. And anyone who says they will only ever use it for something like learning is flat out liar and, frankly, missing the point of the internet. I waste time on the internet and I am productive on the internet. Use the full spectrum of the internet and you'll get the most out of it as what it is: a tool. The choice is yours
My work here is dung.
The internet just enhances what is already there. Stupid people become more stupid and intelligent people become more intelligent.
It changes the way a person thinks.
Instead of worrying about retention of specific knowledge, I find myself caring more about how to find information again if I should need it. I've been treating the Internet like an extended memory bank. It certainly adds to my humility and (by extension) my critical thinking skills that it takes only a few seconds with Google to demonstrate the inferiority of my personal knowledge and experience on any issue. Questioning your convictions on any topic often leads to a new way of looking at things.
Dedicating a moment's thought to it, I don't believe the Internet can make a person dumber, but it can contribute to intellectual laziness - being convinced that the answer is out there if you care enough to look for it could conceivably make you less likely to try to figure something out for yourself.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
Yes, but if you can look things up, then why bother to think about it? A large part of why some people are smarter than others is that they think about things, the ability to look up things without critical thinking is definitely not going to make a person smarter. It can in fact have the opposite effect in that since there's no filtering going on, a person can start to believe all sorts of stupid things.
Mark Twain once said of newspapers: "If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you DO read a newspaper, you are misinformed." The internet works the same way.
I think more critically now than I ever did before the Internet.
http://xkcd.com/552/
Did the printing press make us dumber?
The Internet and associated technologies like the WWW are an intelligence enhancer on a larger scale than that.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It certainly draws your attention as to just how many dumb people there are!
What the Internet has done is that almost no matter how obscure your preferences are, it's a group on the Internet for it. According to the latest stats there's 1.8 billion people online. Even if one in a million think like you, there's 1800 of them on the Internet. There's language barriers and some other details too, but still. Of course it's natural that like minded people meet, but on the Internet it's so extreme you run into groupthink - Exhibit A.
Take for example the coming wave of elderly in the western world. Here on slashdot we have mostly technological/geeky solutions. Doctors for the most part have medical solutions. Economists has some monetary solutions. Each group can think because they all just read their own sites that they've understood what "everybody" thinks and what "consensus" is on how to solve it, in short that they're smart when really their solutions are shallow, unfeasible and incomplete because they haven't been challenged enough. You see it with some computer systems, all the geeks agree it's great but unless you get user testing from somewhere else it very often flops.
I don't think we've really gotten dumber on the fundamentals even though we search the Internet rather than know by heart, there's much less meaning in memorization and hand calculation but then I never felt that to be a valuable skill in itself - it's a bit like measuring your writings by your fountain pen technique. The real value is what you understand, your ability to draw reasonable conclusions. Knowledge is important because you need to know the facts and the context to draw those conclusions from. It takes different skills because so much on the Internet is bullshit, if ypo put someone who is used to only serious and reliable sources and put online they could end up being dumber. But the younger generation who knows the pitfalls, they can go much further.
I simply think the answer is that we're getting more specialized, which is neither smarter or dumber - just different.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The first article doesn't address the notion that these changes in thought patterns could lead to greater intellectual abilities down the road. The author says:
but maybe that's subject to change over time, as more and more humans don't pay deep attention. Or maybe we will adapt to be able to more easily pay attention deeply to the most important details.
Additionally, even if that doesn't happen (soon, or ever), maybe humanity as a whole is better served this way. Maybe we don't need everyone to be a deep thinker. Maybe we can benefit from a large segment of people who can think quickly, but not as deeply.
In other words ... Idiocracy is funny, but unlikely. We will adapt and move forward over time, as we always -- given sufficient time -- have.
Let us consider two cases:
What have we gained as a direct result of these technologies? What have we lost?
Is it worth it?
I remember being told to play outside all day - back when we could do that without sunscreen and without getting burned. It used to be that I had to make a plan and stick with it if I was going to meet a friend - I couldn't call them when I got to the place and THEN figure out where they were waiting. I didn't used to be a slave to the byzantine contract or incessant needs of my portable phone (that probably isn't giving me cancer). I imagine libraries were a lot more popular, living rooms were centered around conversations or musical instruments, and if you couldn't sleep you could listen to live performances on the radio. To name just a few examples.
What have we gained? Well, the space on my desk that used to be for a rolodex/business cards is now taken up with Arduinos & servos. My girlfriend sits up in bed and watches Glee on her iPad instead of finishing her cross stitch. Pinging the hivemind to solve a technical query is pretty damn awesome. uh... everything else I can think of is probably a negative.
So while I haven't definitively made up my mind, I feel like the evidence I am aware of leans towards "worse off".
The internet provides more opportunities for being stupid in public.
The Internet, in sharp contrast, is rich with content of very high value, easily accessed by anyone with even moderate 'net skills and literacy. The problem is if you come in with the average set of skills our culture and our pre-college school system provide you with, you aren't equipped to take advantage of that unless you did a lot of self-starting as well.
Anecdote: Recently, I interviewed young folks for an internship; what I wanted was an ability to read and write at a decent level, use a spelling checker, and basic (+-*/) math skills. I went though over ninety applicants before I found one. Over ninety!
But they all had lots of experience in in high school sports. And someone -- most assuredly not me -- had told them this would count for something. Maybe if the job is ditch digging, it would, but not in an office environment.
Slashdot is a collection of people so atypical - so skilled as compared to the average US citizen - that I can't even imagine comparing how they process tv and schooling as compared to the average citizen. When we ask here how television affects someone, we're asking a group that's already been selected for way above average skill sets. For instance, if I watch Fox News, I spend the entire time either laughing or shaking my head in disgust. But it's the most popular news broadcast in the country.
To paraphrase Phil Plait, it seems as though we're doomed.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Cynical jokes aside, what's most distinct about humans, as compared to other living things, is the human capacity to learn. The mass of the brain is there less for calculating than for acquiring and linking more information.
We've had an enormous breakthrough in rapidly disseminating information and enabling self-education. That some people make blunders and that some mistaken ideas are more widely circulated does not contradict this. Asking whether the Internet makes us smarter is like asking whether providing light, water, and enriched soil makes plants grow better.
Years ago, there was an incredibly awful country song, "Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning," by Alan Jackson, with the lyric, "I'm just a simple man/I don't know the difference between Iraq and Iran." At the time, whenever I heard the song, I'd think, "So put the microphone down, go the library, and find an encyclopedia, dumbass." These days, whenever I hear anyone ask a question for basic information -- where is Turkmenistan? who is K. D. Laing? -- the answer is frequently, "I'm not sure -- check Wikipedia," or, "Google it."
Simple ignorance is more easily overcome than in the past. Willful ignorance is harder to defend.
It makes Humanity smarter but Internet users dumerer.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.