Your question of the day: Cats land on their feet. Toast lands butter side down. What happens if you strap a piece of toast on a cat’s back and drop it?
I just finished reading this book called “The Shallows” which discusses how the use of the Internet is rewiring our brains and is making us, for a lack of a better term, dumber. Or maybe not dumber in the largest sense of the world but much less likely to perform deep thinking and true introspection on topics. Essentially, the internet allows us to gain a great deal of data rapidly but prevents us from obtaining actual knowledge.
The main idea behind it is that the Net is designed for constant distraction. You always have interruptions from emails or instant messages. We have trained ourselves to quickly gleam the most important information from a page in seconds without even glancing at any other items on the page. Search engines provide us with answers quickly and keep us from looking around to find a broader picture. We have gained convenience but have lost depth.
For me this is rather fascinating given that my life has been spent half in a pre-internet age and half in a data immersed world and I have to say that on many levels I agree with this argument. I just checked and the number of books I read on a yearly basis steadily fell from 1998 on while I would reckon that the amount of time I spent online rose. While obviously that online time was spent reading I can’t say that I gained anything from it. It isn’t as though I have ever stumbled across a website that influenced my way of thinking as much as a book has. The web just doesn’t have that depth to it.
(It is interesting though that I will end up reading more books this year than I have in a decade and that might entirely be due to my owning a Kindle. For some reason (possibly because I have grown so accustomed to looking at a screen) I read more now that I have one. Much of the arguments about how the web interrupts our thought process with hyperlinks and video don’t really apply with the Kindle though they would with an iPad. Which is why I am sticking with my Kindle.)
I would agree that the internet has shortened our attention span. It is designed to provide information quickly, which is the goal of all computer systems. The web was not designed to answer the philosophical questions of our time. It was designed for the rapid flow of information and / or porn. But what strikes me more is how the internet has not only made our thinking shallower but it has also made us shallow on a more emotional level.
We must admit to ourselves that when we are online we are not dealing with people but with the digital representations of people and as such our interactions in that medium do not match what we hope for in society. Look at the comments section of any site and you will see arguments, name calling and the worst use of grammar that you could ever imagine yet this is all considered acceptable behavior because no one on the other end is “real”. Though there are people I have followed online for over a decade they are no more real to me than Kermit the Frog. There entire existence has been words on a screen. It creates a massive disconnect.
What happens though is this really deadens ourselves to the outside world. We lose empathy and connection. After spending a day watching funny videos of people falling down watching someone fall in the street no longer results in a response of “Oh my God, is that person hurt?” You now reach for your camera phone. Political arguments typically end with calling someone a Nazi. And in the one that I am most guilty: any news story, any confession, any expression of true human emotion is met with a snarky, cynical comment. Even when we are with real people we still treat them as a bunch of ones and zeroes.
The internet is here to stay. No one is arguing that we should turn back the clock. We just have to be aware that the tools we use impact us in more ways than we could ever imagine.
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