The Internet and You.

Over at Slate, Annie Murphy Paul has a thought-provoking review of Duke University's Cathy N. Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. Primarily a work for those in education, Paul aimed her review towards Davidson's usual fair of finding extravagant meaning behind every day technological innovations (often taking, as Paul points out, generous leaps through logical hoops to do so). Davidson's argument centers on the effect technology is having on the brains of those who have grown up with it. She claims that the sheer amount of what we're capable of through the internet, smart phones, and even video games is changing the neurology of "digital natives", those of us who have grown up never knowing a world without computers.

While technology is unarguably changing the way we use our brains (quick: list as many telephone numbers as you can), the response to this change seems to be largely negative. The Atlantic's Nicholas Carr wrote a much-ballyhooed column headlined "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The idea is, your brain uses less energy to remembering things it knows it can find at a keystroke. I mentioned the death of remembering a telephone number; in-car GPS navigators present perhaps a more stark example, with humans literally following directions mindlessly, often to places they've been many times before. Here's what one blogger wrote on the subject:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

 Wait. That's not a blogger. That's Socrates. In 320 BC. Talking not about Google or iPhones, but the highly advanced and elitist technology of writing (it should be noted I found this quote in James Gleick's fantastic book, The Information). Socrates, after all, did not write anything we associate with him (or, as far as we know, anything at all). Neither did Homer. The mysterious, blind poet of Ancient Greece authored and passed on The Iliad and The Odyssey purely through an oral tradition. This reality makes the doomsayers of the loss of our memory's to the microchip seem rather quaint. What's that? You wrote your Master's thesis on a legal pad? That's cool, I guess. Try memorizing this bad boy.

While the basic sentiment of the worries of folks like Carr and Paul is correct (we are remembering less the more we have instant access to), I don't really see the problem with this. Shall we ditch calculators because they lessen our ability to solve massive math problems when left to our own (ahem) devices? For that matter, we better throw out the compass. And maps. And dictionaries. Call Dmitri Mendeleev: we won't be needing that nifty periodic table once all chemists have put in the time to memorize the atomic mass, weight, and number for all 117 elements.

Having a problem with how the internet is training our brains is not just backwards: it's an assault on what we have come to know as knowledge. The opposite argument to the extremes I presented would be, why learn anything at all if Wikipedia can tell me? Well, Wikipedia, like any other resource, is the product of human knowledge. When we write the time for an appointment on a Post-It and put it on our fridge, the Post-It has not come to dominate us. We humans remain the source (even for Jeopardy-champ Watson). And, far more importantly, once we've put the information out there, it becomes instantly available for others, who then gain the knowledge themselves. When we take money out of the ATM, the ATM is not the receiver of the message. It simply tells the people at the bank what money we've taken out. Lest we devolve into Matrix-style slaves, technology will always remain the middle-man.