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.