Looking back I can still recall the day we first got a personal computer. It was Christmas Day 1995, when my dad turned on the Packard Bell monitor and the screen illumed for the first time. I can recall the weeks leading up to the moment and the arguments my dad laid out for such an expensive purchase. "The kids will be able to write all of their papers on it, Kimberly," my dad insisted. "They'll be able to look up all of their information on the internet." We did indeed use the internet a lot for school and the computer became the center of our household for a few years. Slowly however the luster of the pc dulled and the computer became just another piece of furniture; the radio of the 50's, the television set of the 60's and the VCR of the 90s. As we immersed ourselves into an increasingly digital world our way of living began to change dramatically. Things began to move faster, smoother. Suddenly information that used to take days to get from the library and hours on dial up internet was available literally right when we wanted it. The proficiency of Yahoo and Google allowed us to gain quick access to information that we didn't even know we were looking for. As companies began to advertise virally the internet became more distractive. As the internet became more personal IMs and video pop-ups began to cause information overload. Our minds needing to catch up with the processing we were demanding of it, adapted to this new information flow and our brains grew more restless, demanding of us the quick flow of information we had seduced it with. How would this evolving technology affect our society and the people living within it? Is the internet making us stupid? This question is being asked more and more often as we approach the 20 year mark of the reign of the World Wide Web. At first the question may seem harmless enough but if we get to the heart of the matter we begin to realize that it is not just some trivial remark, but rather a question that delves deeper into our society and the impact the internet has had on it. I do believe the internet has altered the way our brains function and it is the central piece of a communication revolution that has left us so bombarded with information that our minds have had to alter, becoming less thoughtful to keep up with the changing world.
Nicholas Carr's article Is Google Making Us Stupid, published in the July/August edition of the Atlantic Magazine, addresses the question of whether or not the internet is affecting the minds of the users who have grown accustom to the amount of information it unloads. Early in the article Carr asserts that he has noticed for a while that he has not been thinking the way he used to; like someone has been tampering with his brain. Carr says that he feels it mostly when he is reading; immersing himself into a book or lengthy article is no longer as easy as it used to be. After a life time of reading books Carr's concentration had begun to grow lax. "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do," (Carr, p. 2).
What is the impetus for such a dramatic shift in brain function though? Carr attributes it to the rise of the internet and the 'culture of now' that it has created. He maintains that the internet has become a "universal medium," through which most of the information that we see passes through, (Carr, p. 2). He also quotes one Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist, as saying that "media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought," (Carr, p. 2). If we follow this assertion to its logical conclusion we can maintain that the internet can alter the way we think, and if by using the internet we are forced to process countless bits of information, from pop up ads to instant messages, on a second to second basis, then we might carry these mental processes into other aspects of our lives. If this is the case then our attention spans should be shrinking into nothingness.
Where is the proof though, one might ask. If this is the case surely something should confirm the fact. Carr does site one research program conducted by University college London which found that people using their site, which contains various articles and text sources, exhibited, "'a form of skimming activity,' hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited," (Carr, p. 3). Apart from this, Carr sites no new studies.
What other indicators, if any, exist in our society today which might confirm Carr's suspicions? If we look at other media outlets and the trends they have adopted in the internet age, we can see that they at least have bought into Carr's beliefs; in particularly television programs and newspaper and magazine articles. "Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazine and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse information snippets," (Carr, p. 5). These adaptations are implemented to meet the audience's new expectations; expectations of fast flow information which we find on the internet. Especially telling of the new media trends might be newspapers like the Columbus Dispatch which has an entire section called News at a Glance, which allows readers to read one paragraph summaries of already short articles written within the pages of the paper. Yet another strong indicator of our evolving expectations might be the sheer drop in newspaper sales over the past decade. Newspapers have become a thoroughly undesirable media outlet, partly because of easy access to online information and partly because our attention spans are diminishing.
Are we indeed becoming less intelligent? I would say that depends on your definition of intelligence. Are our brains functioning on a lower level? Technically we are more productive than ever before; in fact it is estimated that the average American, because of the internet and text messaging, reads more on a daily average than we did in the 70's and 80's when television was our main media source. It's simply a different kind of reading; a shallow skimming of countless amounts of information rather than a deep uncovering of it, (Carr, p. 3). My definition of understanding something, which is really at the heart of intelligence, is the ability to find connections in seemingly unconnected things. It’s hard to fully understand anything when we skim over it.
This leads me to assert that we are indeed growing less intelligent. However I do not believe that the internet can be held entirely accountable for our fledgling brain power. There are so many distractions in this brave new world of communication, texting being the worse, that it is hard to imagine a world that isn’t getting dumber by the day. When you leave class and enter into the long procession of zombies lumbering down the hall, heads tilted down, i Phones tightly in grasp, bumping into each other, you realize there's something not quite right about this fucked up world.
