Internet

Does Technology Alter Our Thinking?

Does the Internet rewire our brains?

A thought provoking article in The Atlantic by Nicholas Carr argues that every shift in technology provoked fears about altered human thinking processes:

Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

With the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century, Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery.

Someone observed that Nietzche’s typewriter had changed his writing style. “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style,” said Friedrich A. Kittler.

What about the Internet?

A study of online research habits at University College London found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

“It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense,” the report said.

Socrates was not wrong - he was shortsighted:
Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

But Carr still fears our diminishing intelligence:
As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

(h/t to Marcel Reichart, Image by Dan4th)

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