As you enter my tastefully disheveled living room, your gaze might well fall upon a half dozen paperbacks stacked carelessly on a small table -- books I've finished and haven't reshelved or, more likely, books I've started and haven't finished. If you'd visited me six months ago, those same books probably would have presented themselves for your inspection. A couple are guide books; a couple are fiction; one is -- for lack of better description -- a contemplation of the interaction between technological change and social evolution. The only book whose reading I'd consider as requiring the reader's serious, focused attention would be Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.
The Elegant Universe stands out from the others by virtue of its clean, shiny, unwrinkled cover. The book -- although having perched on my table for many months -- has obviously never been opened.
Nicholas Carr, author of -- among other works -- The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains -- wouldn't be surprised. What the internet is doing, he argues, is dumbing us down.
Our brains continually re-wire themselves to meet our demands. For the past thousand years and until recently, Carr points out, brains of educated men1 have been wired to read, to reflect, to analyze, and to synthesize. Reading reflectively places information and ideas into the brain's long term memory, a region where it's available for analysis and synthesis. "The Educated Man" -- the man whose brain had so developed -- was responsible for all the advances we've enjoyed in the arts and sciences since the bleak days of the Dark Ages.
The internet, on the other hand, does not demand reflective reading, and does not result in an organized body of information being stored in our long-term memories. Instead, Carr argues, our recently developed "hypermedia" encourage "clicking, skipping, and skimming." We look for fast, one-paragraph answers to specific questions. We find the answer on-line, for either our use or our amusement, and then we go on to something else. We still see and enjoy all the individual pretty trees, so to speak; we're losing, however, much of our capacity to notice -- as our ancestors, reading for long hours in a library would have noticed -- that the trees join to form a forest.
This long-term memory consolidation that today's brains are failing to achieve, in Carr's opinion, is the physiological basis for true intelligence. As a result -- we're getting dumber. Those of us who completed our formal education before the seductive lights of the world wide web danced about us with their many distractions have been only partially dumbed down. Our real concern should be with today's students -- kids writing supposedly critical school essays from Wikipedia and its hyperlinks, while at the same time multi-tasking with iPods, Facebook, cell phones and TV. How much information ever works its way very deeply into their young brains -- and to what extent have their brains even developed the tools to absorb, to analyze, to synthesize?
The Elegant Universe is critically acclaimed as perhaps the finest, clearest description of string theory -- the theory of our own universe's fundamental structure -- available to the general lay reader. It sits on my table, unread, because I find it more exciting -- less hard work, more immediately gratifying, less difficult to accomplish while subjected to constant distractions -- to look up stuff on Wikipedia, to check out people and their lives on Facebook, to read the barrage of news stories found on-line.
To write my blog.
Brains, like muscles, make constant adjustments to the demands placed on them. They build up; they build down. Carr says that today, brains in our digitalized society are building down. The allures of the internet are the primary cause.
Based on what I know about myself, I sure couldn't say he's wrong.
Oh, by the way. I didn't, of course, read Carr's book. I just read a two column review of the book in the Economist (6-26-10). Who has time to read an entire book? I have a blog to write.
-----------------------1Throughout this essay, I use "man" and "men" in their antiquated, neuter gender, non-sex-specific sense. I do so intentionally, without discriminatory intent -- elevating hoped-for elegance of expression over clumsier language that some may deem more politically correct. Please try to live with it.
5 comments:
I haven't read the book either, but I've seen Mr. Carr on Stephen Colbert's show and some other place I can't remember.
I'm not sure he's right about this. Our brains may be changing, but I don't think we're getting dumber. We still analyze and synthesize information, just a wider variety of it.
Similar arguments, by the way, arose several centuries ago, when the printing press was new. That's the same invention that led to your educated man. :P
"Dumb" was my word, not Carr's. But he does think our brains are changing in a way that makes us less able to think deeply and creatively. He'd agree, I gather, that we're better able to get fast answers to specific questions or problems.
Looking over the review, I guess Carr used the term "literate mind," rather than "educated man." He dates that back over 1,000 years -- in other words, to the end of the so-called Dark Ages and the beginning of the medieval era. You may be right that similar arguments were made when moveable type came along, but the availability of more reading material obviously (to me) had much less impact than the internet has had on the way our minds function.
I have no idea whether Carr's right. It just sounds plausible. Not having read the book, I don't know if he has any sociological, neurological, etc., data to back it up.
By the way -- where the heck have you been the last few months? Did you get a summer job?
No summer job - just my usual summer pattern of constant boredom and no useful actions.
One other point - many major breakthroughs thoughout human civilization have resulted in fundamental changes to our way of life, and thus how our brains work. Agriculture, written language, and the Industrial Revolution are clear examples. There's no guarantee that the information revolution will be as beneficial as some of the others in the end; but really, the jury's still out on all of them.
Agreed. In fact my partially unread book on technological changes that I mentioned makes that point. Well, not the effect on the brain, per se, but maybe that's implied.
But Carr's specific point is that the internet's tendency to make us pick up bits and pieces of information in a hurry has a direct and specific effect on our brain functions because it deals specifically with the way information is stored and retrieved and organized and used. More general societal changes may also have effects, but less direct and dramatic. Again, he may be all wet, or on to something. I don't know. Every change brings with it alarmists who tell us that humanity as we've known it to date is doomed or about to be massively changed.
As for your boring summer, you never appreciate boring summers until you no longer have them. :-) Enjoy it while you can. If you're spending the summer in Boulder, you're near of the best hiking areas in the country -- you should take advantage of it if you can.
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