What the internet is doing to our brains …
There are those who are heartened by the ease with which our minds are adapting to the Web’s intellectual ethic. “Technological progress does not reverse,” writes a Wall Street Journal columnist, “so the trend toward multitasking and consuming many different types of information will only continue.” We need not worry, though, because our “human software” will in time “catch up to the machine technology that made the information abundance possible.” We’ll “evolve to become more agile consumers of data. The writer of a cover story in New York magazine says that as we become used to “the 21st century task” of “flitting” among bits of online information, “the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information.” We may lose our capacity “to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end,” but in recompense we’ll gain new skills, such as the ability to “conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media.” A prominent economist writes, cheerily, that “the web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores.” An Atlantic author suggests that our “technology-induced ADD” may be a “short term problem,” stemming from our reliance on “cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow.” Developing new cognitive habits is “the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity.”
These writers are certainly correct in arguing that we’re being molded by our new information environment. OUr mental adaptability, built into the deepest working of our brains, is a keynote of intellectual history. But if there’s comfort in their reassurances, it’s of a very cold sort. Adaptation leaves us better suited to our circumstances, but qualitatively its a neutral process. What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. In the 1950s, Martin Heideger observed the looming “tide of technological revolution” could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Our ability to engage in “meditative thinking,” which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, dorwn out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The “frenziedness of technology,” Heidegger wrote, threatens to “entrench itself everywhere.”
It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.
- Closing remarks from Nicholas Carr @ “The Shallows” (pg. 221-222)
This is one of the most interesting, helpful, and practical (and oddly, most theological) books I have read in a long time.
There are two copies available at the UCI Science Library :U
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