World Wide Wits?

Is the Internet making us dumber?

Are we outsourcing our higher brain functions to the machines that live on our desks? Are we letting the Internet turn us into a version of itself?

That is the thesis of Robert Carr’s widely read and even more widely discussed Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In the piece, Carr notes that his own Internet use is chipping away at his powers of “concentration and contemplation.” Using a considerable amount of evidence, Carr speculates that we are being reprogrammed by the Internet to think like it does. We are turning our brains into Internet-reliant and ever-changing indices of information, instead of stationary encyclopedias.

By Carr’s logic, Internet-addicted human brains are moving away from the cave paintings, abaci and comic books that satisfied us for millennia into an all-new world of instant entertainment and on-demand information.

Carr says that Google and its ilk are doing nothing less than creating an “artificial intelligence” for us, turning human intellect into a mechanized and searchable process. As Carr reflects, ambiguity and gray areas have no place in a universe where everything can be cross-referenced, analyzed, and instantly accessed.

The implications are disturbing. If Carr is right, Google is sapping us of our ingrained contemplation and reasoning power and replacing it with, well, itself. Could the Internet utility we depend on for so much be inadvertently changing us for the worst?

Not so fast. To Peter Suderman of the American Scene, in “Your Brain Is an Index,” the opposite is occurring. Google isn’t making us stupider at all.
Indeed, it may be making us smarter. Suderman says, “Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access and cross reference.”

By Suderman’s logic, Google and the Internet are actually making us smarter, changing our brains from the encyclopedias they used to be into comprehensive indices. Instead of carrying important information and data around in our brains, we are carrying around a list of locations and ways to find that information on the Internet. We retain less, but we know how to access and use more.

In the past, we would “become” books and think like they did in a linear, page-by-page way. Now we are quite literally “becoming” the Internet, thinking in terms of indices and the ever-changing location of the information we need.

We usually define a “smart person” as someone who can remember and synthesize the most information at any given time — the kind of person who can do calculus in his head or remember every king of Poland without consulting a textbook.

Now that all that information is accessible on the Internet, we may have to change what “smart” means. We might have to create a society where badass Google/Wolfram Alpha/whatever skills will gain precedence over good old total recall.

Deep reading and contemplation may very well have to lose out to wider (and shallower) skimming. But will we end up knowing more on the whole? I think it’s highly likely.

The most successful bloggers and Internet mavens spend their entire working day scouring the web for info, contemplating it, then putting up real-time analysis and opinion. Making connections between material, adding to the universal index, and cataloguing the world’s information will become the important skills of a Google-defined world.

As a happy slave to Google and its compatriots, I myself take umbrage with Carr’s statement that the Internet somehow stifles ambiguity and contemplation. I’d argue the opposite.

Today, we can access almost any information at any time. I think the total-access offered by the Internet has actually improved the quality of my contemplation. I can consider all sides of the issue and all relevant information to a given topic instantly, without having to go to the library or ask around.

All that information will also help the cause of ambiguity. It’s a lot easier to see gray areas and exceptions if all the information is on the table.
There are drawbacks to trusting our knowledge to the Internet. There’s always the chance that the Internet could be destroyed or temporarily knocked out, bringing future generations internet-centralized knowledge crashing down with it.

Further, I do not think the model of being Internet — or index — smart only is in any way sustainable as the world exists today. The Internet is by no means accessibly for most of the planet — ask Beduoin herdsmen or Bhutanese cliff dwellers what their connections are like. Hell, even Cox’s connection goes down on a bi-weekly basis, no matter how much I swear at them on the phone.

So before we reach that utopian or dystopian point of entrusting our brains to the Hive Mind, we’ll need to be certain that the Internet is accessible to all and totally reliable. Good luck with that, geeks. You’re going to need it.

I don’t think it’s possible to turn back the clock on the Internet, and its effect on the way our minds work. My generation is perfectly comfortable with using the Internet as the world’s biggest, baddest index and information source. Future generations will doubtlessly rely upon it even more.

We can figure out how to blend Internet information and stationary information. I have faith in us. Humanity has, after all, come this far. The ascent of the Internet can only aid the advancement of human knowledge.

Faine Greenwood is a senior in Newcomb-Tulane College. She can be reached for comment at sgreenwo@tulane.edu.