The Internet and
the Republic of Skepticism, Part One
Having recently found
myself in need of an anecdote with which to make some allegedly clever point
about man's track record in predicting his own technological innovations, I
recalled a story that had made the rounds in the months leading up to 2000,
during which time the nation's periodicals were running retrospectives on the
soon-to-be-completed 20th century. Some great number of the resulting feature
articles of that era ended up beginning with the same account of a U.S. patent
clerk who had resigned his post in 1899 with the explanation that everything
worth inventing had already been invented. The incident seemed to me
sufficiently amusing to be thrown in to the essay as essay filler, which is
the stuff that writers throw into essays when they get sick of their own
writing (unless I'm the only one who does this, in which case the term does
not actually exist). At any rate, the story would serve as a fine
illustration of the manner by which even attentive individuals often overlook
the indications that great change is afoot. A few moments and Google search
terms later, though, I had learned that this oft-repeated anecdote was almost
certainly false.
The patent clerk myth had
been printed as fact in quite a few respected publications throughout 1999 -
this, despite that very same myth having been debunked by The
Skeptical Inquirer back in 1989. Ten years after the tale was shown
to be false, then, a number of professional journalists and their
fact-checkers got wind of it and determined it to be true. Yet another ten
years on, I recalled the tale and was able to determine it to be false - and
after less than half a minute of thing-clicking. This is hardly to my credit;
I was simply working in an informational landscape vastly superior to that
which existed a decade ago. For instance, humanity has made impressive strides
with regards to the results one may obtain by way of thing-clicking.
Look back to 1989, when
the Skeptical Inquirer article in question was released. Tens
of thousands of people may have read the piece at that time and found it
interesting, but altogether the author was unable to have much positive impact
on the public understanding. The limitations of the era made it quite unlikely
anyone who read the piece would happen to be in a position to use the
information therein in any significant manner; conversely, those who could
have used the information in some way that would be of measurable benefit were
quite unlikely to have known that such a useful article existed, much less
been able to locate it, and thus it was that some dozen or so feature editors
ran the myth as fact. In terms of its utility to the public understanding,
then, the article might as well not even have existed until it existed on the
internet.
Taken together, the rise of
the search engine coupled with the digitalization of vast amounts of
information that would have previously been either difficult or impossible to
access has provided us with unprecedented opportunities to debunk that which
requires debunking, as well as to ensure that a given debunking is
particularly accessible to those who happen to be looking into a given
subject. This is just as well; the rise of such things as e-mail forwards have
provided our not-so-skeptical adversaries with similarly unprecedented
opportunities to perpetuate things that need to be debunked, which you've
probably experienced to the extent that you're included in the address books
of people in whose address books you were not really intending to be included.
The question that naturally arises, then, concerns whether the particular
dynamics of the internet have had the overall effect of fueling nonsense or
throttling it.
The reader will agree that
the extent and nature of the stimuli that one takes in has some effect on the
content one accumulates in one's mind; the reader will just as readily agree
that the internet has some effect in turn on the extent and nature of the
stimuli one takes in. To the extent that one uses the internet, then, one is
subjected to a different array of stimuli than if one did not use the
internet. We thus establish that the internet does indeed have some effect on
the content one accumulates in one's mind.
Less immediately obvious,
though still fairly obvious, is the extent to which a given medium has an
effect not only on the user's knowledge base, but even the structure of the
mind itself, and thus in turn its potential products. The adaptation of
writing by the classical Greeks, for instance, appears to have brought radical
changes in the nature of Greek output, allowing for a fundamentally greater
degree of abstract thought than was previously possible, and allowing in turn
for systems of ethics and high philosophical commentary of the sort that we do
not seem to find in the oral output of the pre-alphabet Greeks or any
pre-literate culture, in fact. Plainly, this is an extreme example, and the
transition from orality to literacy is likely of more severity in terms of the
cognition of the user than is the transition from the printing press to the
internet (both of which are merely sub-mediums by which literacy may be
conveyed). Even so, the severity of the former is of sufficiently high degree
that the lesser severity of the latter is nonetheless potentially quite great
in its own right. The shift from a textual environment defined by the printing
press to one providing for the internet as well, then, must have some
undefined impact - perhaps even a great one - on the cognitive abilities of
those of us who have participated in the transition, as well as those who will
have grown up in the post-transition era.
The attentive reader will
notice that we have yet to establish whether or not the cognitive impact that
we have determined to exist along with the impact on one's knowledge base is a
good or bad thing in terms of the mind's overall functioning. The more
widely-read attentive reader will notice that my assertion to the effect that
the internet has any cognitive effect at all is itself controversial, and is
in fact disputed by a number of prominent neuroscientists and others whose
views on the subject would presumably merit attention. Before we continue,
such objections ought to be addressed.
In January of this year, the
publication Edge released the responses to a question its editors had posed to
dozens of authors, journalists, artists, and scientists: "How is the internet
changing the way you think?" The results were picked up on by such mainstream
outlets as Newsweek, from which science editor Sharon Begley makes
the following observation:
Although
a number of contributors drivel on about, say, how much time they waste on
e-mail, the most striking thing about the 50-plus answers is that scholars
who study the mind and the brain, and who therefore seem best equipped to
figure out how the Internet alters thought, shoot down the very
idea.
For instance, Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Joshua
Butler responded to the question in part by way of the following:
The
Internet hasn't changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has
changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with
unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what we do with
it once it's made it into our heads. This is because the Internet doesn't
(yet) know how to think. We still have to do it for ourselves, and we do it
the old-fashioned way. Until then, the Internet will continue to be nothing
more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb,
butler.
Others, including others with backgrounds in neuroscience
as well as psychology and related fields, expressed agreement with this
general conclusion, if not necessarily for the same reasons. And thus Begley
is correct to note that "scholars who study the mind and brain" dismiss the
idea that "the internet alters thought." But as she herself makes clear later
in her piece, other scholars of similar and even identical areas of expertise
entirely embrace the idea, while still others identify it as a reasonable
possibility. One might wonder how it is that Begley decided that the "most
striking thing" about the answers is that some mind-oriented scholars
dismissed the idea of the internet's impact on thinking, rather than that
other mind-oriented scholars embraced it. Begley herself quotes several of the
latter grouop, and even makes her own passing reference to "the (few) positive
changes in thinking the Internet has caused" after having quoted additional
experts who likewise ascribe to the concept of the internet having an effect
on the thinking of its users, although considering such changes to be largely
negative. One might conclude that the truly "most striking thing" about the
results is that mind-oriented experts are in fact split three ways on whether
the internet has positive, negative, or no effects whatsoever on the mental
processes of those who use it, while others consider the truth to be as of yet
undetermined.
Of those opinions expressed
to the effect that internet use has either no or negative effects, several
appear not to make much sense. Begley provides a briefer version of the
following excerpt from the answer given by Foreign
Policy contributing editor Evgeny Morozov:
What
I find particularly worrisome with regards to the "what" question is the
rapid and inexorable disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence from
our digital lives. One of the most significant but overlooked Internet
developments of 2009 the arrival of the so-called "real-time Web", whereby
all new content is instantly indexed, read, and analyzed is a potent
reminder that our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely
detached even from the most recent of the pasts...
... In a sense, this is hardly surprising: the
social beast that has taken over our digital lives has to be constantly fed
with the most trivial of ephemera. And so we oblige, treating it to
countless status updates and zetabytes of multimedia (almost a thousand
photos are uploaded to Facebook every second!). This hunger for the present
is deeply embedded in the very architecture and business models of social
networking sites.
Regardless of what one thinks
of Facebook, it is difficult to see that Morozov has really shown that an
obsession with photos and other records of the past somehow denotes some
unseemly and unwarranted "hunger for the present." It would be even more
difficult to see how the nature of the internet, which has provided
unprecedentedly facilitated access to the whole of the past at least to the
extent that the past has been recorded, is of any greater detriment to man's
collective focus on that which came before him. Sitting in an easy chair in
some unscrubbed corner of Brooklyn, I may obtain, within just a few seconds, a
general summary of any known event in the history of man or nature, coupled
with links to more specific and comprehensive sources of information on some
great number of aspects of such an event, including those pieces of data from
which the general summary was originally composed in the first place. How long
would this have taken in the 1950s, even for someone with the advantage of
residing in some cultural node equipped with fine libraries, universities, and
potentially accessible experts? It would have likely taken at least an hour
even in such an optimal environment as the grounds of a university, which is
the sort of place that not even a student is likely to be at any given moment,
if memory serves, which it very well may not. It would certainly not have
taken a mere ten seconds, as it would today for me to learn something about,
for instance, the Russo-Japanese War. Incidentally, I just Googled that term,
clicked on a link to its Wikipedia article, browsed the table of contents
found at the top of that page, went straight to a subsection of that article,
read the assertion that Japanese civilians were on the whole not particularly
happy with the extent to which Japan pressed Russia for concessions after its
victory, and then verified that this was the case by clicking on a citation
which in turn led me to the text of a newspaper account of the treaty in
question - a New York Times article from 1905, itself one of
the millions of artifacts to which our predecessors would have been unable to
receive access without some degree of wasted time and difficulty, if at all.
The past has never been anywhere near as accessible, nor as accessed, yet some
complain that the internet has prompted us to become "completely detached"
from same in the favor of the present, which itself has never been so lacking
in accessible content relative to that which came before.
Naturally, other sorts of
objections are raised in the responses. University of California
neurobiologist Leo Chalupa challenges the internet's utility in a manner that
does not seem to draw on his relevant specialty:
The
Internet is the greatest detractor to serious thinking since the invention
of television. Moreover, while the Internet provides a means for rapidly
communicating with colleagues globally, the sophisticated user will rarely
reveal true thoughts and feelings in such messages. Serious thinking
requires honest and open communication and that is simply untenable on the
Internet by those that value their professional
reputation.
I know of no situation in which "honest and open
communication" is necessarily tenable in the first place, although Dr. Chalupa
is correct that there is more to lose in conveying unpopular thoughts by way
of some facet of the internet, which, as he notes, "provides a means for
rapidly communicating with colleagues globally" and which could thus be used
to more widely convey some or another expressed opinion thing that would
consequently evoke some negative reaction from one's fellows, particularly if
one's fellows are easily upset. But surely Mr. Chalupa has some useful
information to convey that will not enrage his colleagues, and at any rate one
would expect that the majority of the information he'd be inclined to
disseminate by way of the internet would be of value, and not damage, either
to the world or to his very own reputation. And surely the majority of
accessible information is worth being made available to the majority of
connected humans, and certainly the information to which one is likely to
expose one's self on the internet is, on the whole, accurate, and thus
potentially useful. Certainly there is misinformation to be found and in some
cases believed, and certainly there is some degree of irrelevant information
that one might be inclined to take in at the expense of time dedicated to
other, more useful pursuits. But the objection that the internet's
facilitation of information flow may damage one's "professional reputation"
due to one's colleagues being unable to handle one's awesome yet edgy ideas
does not strike me as a particularly damning condemnation of the
communications age, although it may tell us something about neurobiology,
which sounds more and more interesting.
There are certainly downsides
- of both the merely potential and nearly universal sorts - to use of the
internet, particularly if the one doing the using is proceeding in an
undisciplined manner. Even its advantages are potential traps, as is known to
anyone who has sought out data on some relevant thing like Chinese wheat
production only to end up spending two hours learning the plots of various
Japanese role playing games. The potential for information addiction is real.
But upon the harnessing of fire, man must have wasted quite a bit of time
staring into it even after having properly utilized it in cooking his meals.
Every new invention entails a test of our will.
Still, I will not cop out of
this argument by suddenly declaring that we all have free will and what will
be will be, a tact that God is always taking out of plain intellectual
cowardice. Rather, I will note again that the views expressed above regarding
the internet's lack of impact on the human mind are countered by views to the
contrary held by individuals with just as much claim to our attention by
virtue of academic background as those with whom they are in
disagreement.
While the credentialed debate
the subject, we may in the meanwhile consider that the perpetuation of
information has, on average, been a positive thing for humanity's station on
the planet, where we were once in actual competition with its other
inhabitants but have since outran them all and are now preparing to decide
which of our old adversaries will get to accompany us to Mars. Insomuch as
that the knowledge we have gained will soon allow us to spread the planet's
life beyond the planet's own confines and thus to perpetuate it well beyond
its earth-bound potential, and to the extent that we favor the perpetuation of
life, we ought to agree that the process by which we have obtained the means
to accomplish all of this - the general uptrend in the average human being's
access to information - might very well be something worth maintaining. And
then we might remember that no one is seriously arguing that the internet has
not increased the average human being's access to information. Whatever other
effects it may have on our mind, it is at least providing it with the
unprecedented potential that comes with having one's mind satiated as the mind
wills. Likewise, it brings the revolutionary novelty that arises when
inviduals can obtain any information in any combination, individuals being to
some degree defined by the information that informs his thoughts. No biologist
should object to the mixing of genes; no humanist should object to the mixing
of memes.
Though it has not been proven
that the internet has some overall cognitive effect on its users that we would
deem positive, those who are convinced that the effect is largely negative or
even non-existent have yet to compile any airtight case, either. But if we ask
the specific question regarding whether or not the internet assists the cause
of skepticism, we may show that it assists the cause of information, and trust
in our collective judgement that the former has nothing to fear from the
latter.
