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.