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.