Before the internet came around what did cultural critics have to complain about? I believe they spent their time kvetching about how television was rotting everyone’s brains. Before that it was movies and before that I believe I have read somewhere that people were concerned about the radio. I’m sure if we take a magical history tour through time we’d find that every generation or so there was something that was going to be the ruin of us all. Even Socrates believed that books would make us stupid because we wouldn’t have to remember everything anymore.
Nicholas Carr came up in another post of mine recently and now here he is making another appearance. Perhaps I should just ignore him and maybe he will go away, but I just can’t help myself. Carr has an essay in Wired adapted from his new book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
In the essay he talks about the plasticity of our brains and how using the internet creates new neural connections which change the way our brains work. This is true. I’m not a neurologist nor do I play one on TV or the internet, but I have read enough books about neurology to know that everything we do with any regularity changes our brains. Reading changes our brains, listening to music changes our brains, learning a second language changes our brains, playing sports changes our brains. It is the nature of our brains to do this.
What bothers me about Carr is the assumption that the changes in our brains from the internet is bad. Of course he manages to pull in some studies to prove his assertion. One study he mentions proves that multitasking is inefficient but multitasking is not exclusive to internet usage even if Carr spins it so it seems like it is.
He mentions another study by a developmental psychologist who concludes that no matter what the context some cognitive skills will be developed at the expense of others. The psychologist notes that computers have increased our visual-spatial skills at the expense of our ability for “deep processing.” I take issue with that.
Carr and others believe that those visual-spatial skills are somehow mutually exclusive to deep thinking skills. Why does he insist that we can have one or the other but not both? The more a neural pathway is used the stronger it gets and the less it is used the weaker it gets. Because I use the internet daily, it does not mean that I am also not taking time to think deeply either online or offline. I have never been without an internet connection since Windows 3.0 and Prodigy in the early 1990s. I haven’t noticed any weakening of my thinking abilities. Or maybe there has been only I’ve become too stupid to notice? (Please no one agree with that last question, it is entirely rhetorical, I hope!)
What is, of course, rather ironic and humorous is the fact that this essay by Carr appears in a technology magazine on the internet.
In a New York Times op-ed piece from a few days ago, Steven Pinker makes a calm rebuttal to Carr’s fear mongering. In his essay Pinker says:
The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.
And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.
Moderation in all things, yes?
And now my cat Dickens is nibbling on my fingers trying to tell me that my internet time for the evening is up. I will now go and perform the incredible feat of reading and thinking while occasionally petting the cats, because, no doubt, as soon as I sit down with a book Waldo will appear for some snuggling too. Does reading and petting my cats at the same time count as multitasking? And if so am I ruining my brain?
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