Turn on, Log in, Wise up
If the internet is dumbing us down, how come I've never felt smarter?
- By Donald Morrison
- Smithsonian magazine, April 2011, Subscribe
A friend told me about some research that shows the Internet is making us all stupid. She didn’t actually tell me. She tweeted, and it ended up on my Facebook wall. Soon I received similar alerts on my other social networking hangouts, so I knew something was up. That’s how people stay informed nowadays: if the news is important, it will find us.
It didn’t take me long to track down the research. It was all over the Web—in blog posts, newspaper articles and a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, a technology writer. The gist is that constant bombardment by Internet stimuli is rewiring our brains—for the worse. We’re losing our ability to read a book, retain information, follow a line of argument and make critical judgments. All we can do now is flit like a hummingbird from Google to YouTube to Reddit, without making much sense of it all. Carr writes about his own inability to concentrate amid all the hypertext links, new-mail pings and blinking banner ads.
I feel sorry for the guy. It must have been hard to write a whole blinking book when he has a tech blog to maintain, apps to download and tweets to re-tweet. Yet I don’t buy his argument. My brain certainly does not feel feebler these days. I have no trouble following arguments on the political Web sites I frequent, and boy do they love to argue there! I remember every joke, quiz and “you-won’t-believe-this” news article my friends send me. (I’d be lost without my friends, especially the ones I’ve never met.) I’m learning stuff all the time.
For instance: I came across that image of the hummingbird while reading about the new research my friend told me about. Not that I read the studies themselves. I merely followed a link from a tweet to a wall post to a magazine article, stopping several times along the way to check my messages. In fact, the article was not in the magazine’s dead-tree version but on its Web site. There I found some interesting items about songbirds, birdbaths, bath soaps, soap operas, opera capes, Cape Cod and cod-liver oil. These led me, via embedded links, to several other sites with even more interesting trivia before I remembered, an hour or two later, what I was looking for.
On Wikipedia I found the amazing fact that the hummingbird is our only feathered friend that can fly backward. Now there’s a metaphor for you. Perhaps our brains can evolve in more than one direction, which in a way refutes those alarmist researchers. Sure, the Internet may shorten our memories and attention spans. But it can also make us whizzes at typing with our thumbs, tracking down old high-school friends and answering messages while watching last night’s “Daily Show” in a separate window. Just as we survived the advent of the telephone, radio and television—which experts back then warned would fry our brains—the Internet may actually be making us smarter.
I mean, just ask me a question, any question, and in a few seconds I can find the answer for you. Before long, the iPhone, the iPad, the Android and similar hand-held, wireless, Web-connected devices will turn us all into walking Wikipedias.
So when somebody brings up the subject of how the Internet is making us dumber, you can just pull out your cool new phone, look up what I’ve written here and inform your interlocutor that the whole idea is so 15 minutes ago. Indeed, I haven’t received a post or a tweet about the subject in more than 15 minutes, which means it can’t be all that important.
Donald Morrison is the author of The Death of French Culture and is a former editor at Time magazine.
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Comments (7)
Doesn't anyone get how amazingly funny this article is? Inherited from my father, my love of the absurd and the sort of tongue-in-cheek humor so adroitly conveyed here by the author was, for me, utter brain-candy!
Posted by Susanne on June 26,2011 | 02:35 PM
This is a horribly argued article! You are claiming that you are smarter because you now know how to look up things on the internet? What are the stats for actual knowledge retention? Just because you have 16 electronic devices in your pocket that you can whip up and type on whith your superfast thumbs does not mean you are smarter, it just means you know how to navigate the internet...which the rest of the world also knows how to do.
Posted by Sarah on June 3,2011 | 07:23 PM
This is one of the most poorly argued editorials I've ever read...in fact it's embarrassing/maddening that it's in the Smithsonian.
Morrison makes his point that we are in fact more intelligence with the very shortsighted assumption that human intelligence is the ability to locate information and any given point...not the ability to process, understand, reason, problem solve, &c. He does not discuss any real sort of intellectual traits, only finding answers, keeping-up-to-date and all the things that computer provide. A "Watson intelligence", which is, in fact, no intelligence at all because all it can do is locate and identify data. While I'm not saying that I agree with Nicholas Carr 100% I think if Morrison had read the article and/or book then he might have written a response to the actual argument of while the internet providing us with endless amounts of data and other trivial factoids, it is in fact impairing our ability to think for long periods of time and process the 'data' in meaningful understandings.
Wikipedia, Google, iPhones are not intelligence, they are machines bringing us data that we have the ability to make intelligence out of.
Posted by Joel on May 10,2011 | 11:14 AM
I am at this moment amidst a thousand trees, growing and not pulped, on the internet, and reading your article. Your article did not dumb me down. It made me think. It made me laugh at our foibles. I enjoyed the presence, however virtual, of a thinker transported to a very small town in the woods. I will take a walk in those woods, and then I will write on my blog, which happens to be a very reflective place that talks about unexpected encounters with real life. I will not twitter, nor post to FaceBook--in my opinion a time sucker if ever there was one. But I will use our marvelous message tools to work more efficiently, add to my play, and deepen my reflection. No one spoon feeds any of that to you. So I say, embrace the abilities we are given,mindfully and with intention. Just how we always in all ages should be living life.
Posted by Pat on April 5,2011 | 09:44 AM
I disagree that the internet is dumbing us down. I read all kinds of things, and research others, for the information I want and need. And I don't stop at just one article, one website, one persons opinion. I continue until I've seen the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, and everything else in between.
And once you know what you're looking for, you don't notice pictures and ads and all that jazz on every website. I read this article all the way through without once glancing at any of the ads or pictures. Then again, if I were reading an article on beauty or fashion, I probably would, only because I believe certain items should be referenced with pictures and advertisements.
There are many other situations in life where we could use the abilities mentioned above. I can still read a book, regardless if online or on a Kindle or purchasing a hard copy from the store. I retain most information, as I've always done, so when I'm out at the next gathering of friends I could actually follow a line of argument when we discuss and/or disagree on certain topics. And critical judgments, well don't we all critically judge everyone and everything most of the time?
Posted by Jessica on March 30,2011 | 11:01 AM
Ok so we can look up anything without going to the Library to do research,yeah,lots of information;very little retention.
You having the advantage of growing up without the internet and u-tube,etc; learned all the attributes Mr. Carr points out we are losing!
Learning to Spell and Write correctly are dead. Critical Thinking - duh, let the internet do the thinking.
Communication,of which body language makes up a large percentage is entirely invisible on the internet.
Dumbing down is the correct term!
Posted by RHT on March 29,2011 | 04:20 PM
I would have loved to read this article, but I couldn't take my eyes off all the fancy wingdings and do-dads on your site.
Posted by Ben on March 24,2011 | 02:40 AM