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.