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.