Slashdot Mirror
A Battle of Wits On the Net's Effect On the Mind
An anonymous reader writes "There's a fascinating duel going on between two Harvard-associated authors, Steven Pinker and Nicholas Carr, on the topic of the Net's influence on the mind. In a New York Times op-ed, Pinker criticizes Carr's argument, as laid out in his new book The Shallows, that our use of the Net is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers. The Net and other digital technologies 'are the only things that will keep us smart,' writes Pinker. In a response on his blog, Carr tears apart Pinker's argument, claiming that Pinker's examples should actually make us even more worried about the possible 'ill effects' the Net is having on our minds. Carr concludes, 'We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors — important skills, to be sure — but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.' Behind the debate is the deeper controversy over whether the human brain is fundamentally adaptable ('neuroplasticity') or genetically locked into patterns of behavior ('evolutionary psychology')."
Most people have never been, are not and will never be deep thinkers able to contemplate beyond the moment, that's not what most people are by their nature, they are mostly very involved with the current and cannot bother to think at all beyond an established routine.
Then there are those who are thinking and contemplating and imagining regardless of the surrounding environment. The Internet gives us ability to get information very quickly and to test our points of view through many people, sort of like peer review of the thoughts.
I vote that the Internet makes smart people smarter and that those who are dumb benefit from ability to get to information quicker than they ever could (if they ever could before, because those who are impatient and not very deep will not bother to look for information through other, slower means.)
You can't handle the truth.
I don't know about the attention problems created or not created by the Net, but I can say that the internet is making me dumber in one aspect, and that is spelling and grammar. In the old days most news and information was filtered through professional organizations, and irrespective of the veracity of such reports at least the grammar and spelling was usually close to perfect.
These days I am exposed to so much bad spelling and grammar that it is having an effect on me. I increasingly find myself not even noticing spelling errors, which bothers me.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I have seen it in myself just recently.
Having been a fairly intellectual person, in the past 5 years or so I have noticed a distinct lack of patience, memory, and attention, and also find it hard to really sit down and get into something - at least until Ive forced myself to and have done it for a while, then I dont even think about it. Quite often now I sit at the PC here intending to browse the web for something relevant to my interests and just have no idea what I want to search for, so Ill instead browse the recommended lists on youtube, or randomly browse wikipedia. Ill let the internet tell me what to pursue instead of thinking for myself.
Its a dangerous tool. In some respects, in the earlier days, its enabled me to push my personal boundaries, but if youre not careful, it can lead to reliance. Its like an addiction, with all the negatives that a narcotic might have. Im not entirely sure what to do about it, short of ditching it completely - but then again, my JOB is the internet as well!
I can't speak for anyone else, but while I do skim the news on Google and Slashdot, I also often delve.
When I saw an article, for example, on CDOs and their role in the 2008 collapse, I spent a couple hours diving into the depths of credit derivatives. Ultimately this led to studying the 1987 S&L collapse and to compare and contrast the two situations. It was very enlightening and all the research was carried out via the Internet.
Is the Internet the cause of facile perusal as he implies?
Is it the the motivating force behind my deeper study?
I would suggest it is neither, or both. It is a means for both skimming and deep traversal. While one might argue that Twitter or Facebook facilitates and hence encourages interruption, one could as easily argue that Wikipedia or The Bureau of Economic Analysis do as much to encourage deep consideration.
I might suggest that there is another cause for his observation: Perhaps he is looking at popular media and its place on the Internet. I think it is reasonable to claim that The New York Times has become more oriented toward trite sound bites during the explosion of the Internet. To this, however, I would ask; correlation or causation? Has the Internet made the New York Times shift, or has mass media been shifting toward bland wire stories and hot-talk editorials independently?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
We are framing the debate incorrectly. Rather than ask what its effect on the individual human being is (an interesting question but not the centrally important one), we should be asking what is the overall effect on "intelligence resident on Earth" of the combination of humans + computers & the net.
Because clearly, humans + the net of computers is becoming a collective intelligence.
The intelligence and knowledge, is no longer located within an individual person, but rather within the distributed knowledge and communication infrastructure as a whole. We have made our environment, our tools semi-intelligent, and it is becoming irrelevant to ask how much does a person know about the world. The most salient question is, how capable is that person of learning continuously, and how much epistemology do they know and practice; in other words, are they capable of continual theory modification without excess belief commitment, and can they use a principled approach to assessing the credibility and consistency of information in an only semi-coherent sea of information from multiple sources. If they can do these things, they can become a zen master of much of human knowledge; they can become an instant semi-expert in any field that does not require automatic (body) knowledge. Make no mistake. The relevant competition (and co-operation) that will take place going forward will be between these "renaissance person" dialectical minds, enhanced by the net's collective knowledge.
What will that be like, we ought to ask, and yes, also, what will it be like for those who cannot adapt to, or for economic reasons cannot plug into, the presence of an intelligent environment.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yes, but is reading such papers truly necessary? I mean perhaps in academia...if you want to teach Philosophy or languages or something...but for true productive work, what does it matter? The way I look at it, the internet has made it matter less how much you know and more how much you can find and use. For all practical purposes, there's not a huge difference between memorizing entire books and being able to quickly pull the same information off Google when you need it. It's now less about what you know, and more about how you can actually use that knowledge.
Have we fully come to terms with the devastating effect that the written word has had on our minds?
In 800 BCE, before the Greeks began to write things down, Homer (or another man by the same name :-)) could compose and recite two vast epic tales - the Iliad and the Odyssey - purely from memory. In the ages before writing prodigious feats of memorization were essential for cultural transmission, and evidence shows that Australian Aborigines have carried traditions down intact across tens of thousands of years. What literate person today could even dream of carrying out such immense tasks of memorization?
Information technology has always affected how we use our brains, and exploiting new capabilities is inevitably associated with allowing older modes of mental information processing and storage to languish. No doubt similar cries of alarm were issued at every earlier information innovation.
In other news, there has been a devastating loss in flint-knapping skill, which takes many years of practice and apprenticeship to perfect. This skill has been essential to the human race for almost all of its existence, having been replaced only in the last few percent of the species history by new-fangled metal-working technology. We won't know for another 4000 generations or so if metal will have the longevity as trusty old flint.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Well, details matter, don't they? We've had these debates before, but we were debating different things.
Radio and TV had huge impacts on culture, but nothing like the web's impact on what is like to be an intellectual. Ultimately the web's impact on culture is going to be much larger than TV or radio -- probably more like the invention of the printing press.
What bothers me about these debates is the assumption that change is necessarily entirely good or entirely bad. When things change, humanity adjusts to a new reality that is sometimes much better than what went before, but never entirely satisfactory.
Take books. We often take the invention of books a baseline case that has no drawbacks. Books give us access to the words and thoughts of people we've never met or who are long dead. Furthermore that access is much more direct an unmediated than the hearsay of oral tradition. But does that mean we only gained, and lost nothing?
I think we probably lost some things with the invention of books. For one thing you can't have anything like orthodoxy without books. Books means you can be educated by the state or religious authorities and then then examined to ensure conformity. The invention of the printing press really destroyed oral tradition, replacing it with commercial popular culture. Now instead of retelling local legends and myths, we recount episodes of "Lost". We may have lost a kind of psychological richness by moving from stories that moved through hundreds or even thousands of storytellers to stories that are created in fixed form. "King Arthur" was the "Harry Potter" of the Middle Ages, but the idea that story must not be touched to remain authentic, that it is even the property of the author means it's unlikely we'll be reading "Harry Potter" hundreds of years from now.
Does this mean we should give up on books or the printing press? Obviously not. It's just that no change comes for free, and great gains aren't made without some corresponding loss.
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More like a battle of half-wits. Both positions are equally incorrect.
Shallow, superficial thinkers are going to use the Internet in shallow, superficial ways. Facebook and Twitter come immediately to mind but there are a myriad of ways to waste time on the Web. Deeper thinkers will use the Internet as a resource, a way to find information rather than for entertainment purposes alone. And it can't be denied that the ease of access to information is what has made the Internet the truly revolutionary thing that it is. It's changed everything. Yes, it's true, a lot of the information on the Web is not very good but most people have come to the realization on their own. If anything, that has actually created a larger group of skeptical, critical thinkers than ever before.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Pray tell!
When I met /. I was impressed with the jewels one could find, and moderation filters out a lot of the dross. Now I'm really curious about those "places" you speak of.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Yeah, my skepticism is largely because I'm in academia. I think I would've been more impressed by that list of credentials before I got into "the game". Now I want to see evidence, not CV lines.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In the U.S. there has been a distinct lack of ability to speak anything other than the most primitive English. It started well before computers were common but it is a growing problem. Without fairly deep language skills thought is always second rate. It would be easy to understand if the people involved spoke English as a second language but what I am observing is that Americans that have had families here for generations are very limited in their speech and understanding. It is frightening to me.