What the Internet Is Doing To My Brain

So, this is nowhere near a novel argument or idea at this point in our (ab)use of the internet, but for some reason this particular video about it really resonated with me and a I felt like writing a little bit to get the ol' brain going since it's Sunday afternoon and all and generally at this point in the day I would just be...well, you know, reading about panda bears on the internet.

Now, before anyone jumps on the "The internet does lots of good things for us too, lol n00bz, STFU!" train here, part of what I like about this video is that it presents the idea that a lot of internet use encourages shallow thinking, but that we should simply be aware of that and balance out the type of work we make our brains do on a daily basis accordingly, rather than being all like "teh internet sux0rz!" (actually, does anyone really type like that anymore?). So don't stop using the internet. I'm not going to stop using the internet, and I don't want to be out there all alone, because I've already got a big enough echo chamber here in this blogspace. But.

But I think the distinction between shallow and deep thinking is an important one. The ability to engage in deep thinking (or "critical thinking," which is either the same or close to the same thing) is, as far as I can tell at least, a learned behavior. You get better at it the more you do it. If you don't do it, or if you don't have to do it, you never learn how. Much of my teaching lately has been increasingly focused on trying to get students to think deeply (or critically, or laterally, or however you want to label it). Some of them take to it like a laser-mounted shark to water, while others flounder and never really find their stride (or stroke?), but by and large the common factor I see in pretty much all incoming college students is that they've never been expected to do it before. At least not in concentrated amounts. And this is weird to me. Not only is it weird, based on my own experiences and biases, it's also just bad.

"In The Iliad, Homer portrays war as fucking awesome."

When I was a kid, I thought about everything. And (let's get this out of the way right away) it wasn't because I was smart or somehow exceptional, it was because I was curious. When I wasn't in school, I spent a fair amount of time playing outside pretty much every day, I played video games obsessively, but only as much as my parents would let me play (usually an hour a day or so), and I read voraciously (big surprise!). There were always times when I wasn't doing any of those things, though, and much of that time was spent wondering about things like why the sky was blue, or why there was evil, or why there was good, or whether or not I believed in God (or any god(s)), and so on. I spent a lot of time thinking deeply, and part of the reason, I think, is because I couldn't access "simple" answers through an internet search like we can nowadays.

"I JUST WANT TO KNOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!"

Recently, I had my Humanities 101 class read excerpts from Plato's Phaedrus, and now every time I think about What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains I can't help but thing of Phaedrus's treatment of the then-new "art" of writing. In the dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus are arguing about the efficacy of writing as a form of communication (and I'm summarizing loosely here), and Socrates relates a story meant to show the supposed danger of writing:

"At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

The tl;dr here is basically that by recording the memories and stories of what had traditionally been a predominantly oral-historical culture in writing, people would actually lose their ability to remember as well because they would begin relying on the written versions of records, stories, myths, etc. Later on in the same section of Phaedrus, Socrates argues that choosing to value the sign of a piece of information (i.e. the written version of a record) over the direct memory of that record itself, we also make ourselves less versatile in our thinking; for him, the important ability is the ability to successfully and convincingly debate a piece of information, a stance on an issue, etc. When you write that information or that stance down as a static document, your opinion becomes less able to adjust on the fly and becomes less robust in the face of criticism due to its existence (primarily, at least) as an artifact rather than a thought or memory.

Pictured: versatility.

And regardless of whether you perceive of it as a good thing or a bad thing, history has borne Socrates's idea out. He was right about our codification of knowledge. As just one example, consider how much of modern-day Christianity is based on trying to retroactively fit values and mores from a two-thousand-year-old culture into present-day society, just because we have an old book with a bunch of rules encoded in it. How different might that particular religion be if that book (and, indeed, all books) never existed?

The (long, boring) point I'm trying to make here is that our "choice" (if you can call a world-wide cultural shifts that) to value the written word over the orally-disseminated memory caused a fundamental change in the way that information was understood. I don't think it's a huge stretch to suggest that the advent of the internet might be the next such shift. As with most such things, I don't think that this shift is necessarily automatically bad or good, and even if it was "bad," what the hell could we possibly do to stop it at this point? The fact is that it's happening and that internet use, much like writing, brings with it certain advantages; however, we also stand to lose a lot in the transition that was good and meaningful and important to the previous information culture (i.e., me) such as what I was calling "deep thinking" above. And, like Socrates, it's hard for me to understand how this loss could possibly be a good thing.

Just like anyone else, I certainly understand the dopamine rush that comes with instant-gratification internet searching. I've gone on my fair share of Wikipedia and TVTropes binges (or, even nerdier, phish.net and ryanadamsarchive.com). And yet I can't help but feel that on some fundamental level, the experiences I have when I step away from the internet are somehow more meaningful, more fulfilling, and more human. That's not to say, again, that there can't be real human value in utilizing or even just listlessly surfing the internet (and in fact, I've built what little of a career I have so far arguing for just this), but it seems to need to be balanced out with experiences that give you an opportunity to think deeply. I make a point, for example, to go for a walk, run, or even a drive pretty much any day I spend more than a few hours working in front of my computer (and thus either actively or passively connected to the internet). Out in the world, doing these activities, is in some way the polar opposite of being enmeshed in the global social sphere of the internet: I'm forced to confront silence, I'm forced to think, and I'm forced to reflect (no mp3 player, CDs, phone calls, anything on these excursions, unless of course someone calls me and I have to answer). For a brief period of time every day, at least, I'm put back in that position I was in as a kid, where I had to make my fun, to use my brain to wonder and learn about the world, and to ultimately make meaning out of nothing rather than having it given to me. I love my work, and I love finding bigger and better ways in which our newest information dissemination technology can make us more human, but it's precisely so that I can keep doing that work, and doing it well, that I need to disconnect as often as I connect.

There's a lot of outcry right now over the apparently reality that college students aren't able (let along willing) to critically think like they used to be able to. Honestly, by and large I don't disagree. While this might partially be an effect (in this country at least) of No Child Left Behind (and that's a whole other blog post in and of itself), and the answer might partially be to Teach Them Harder, I wonder if much of this unwillingness to think deeply comes from a more fundamental place: they way that they understand, create, and access information in their day-to-day lives. Maybe it's making them smarter in new ways while making them dumber in old ways. But I'm pretty convinced we can have our cake and eat it too if we just unplug a little bit (more) each day.

Thoughts?