Unintended consequences

We often take it for granted that progress is inevitable and that it is inevitably good and that there are no downsides. Thus it has been for the internet. No one but no one doubts that the internet has connected the world and provided the world with information and knowledge in unprecedented quantity, that it has enriched our lives and made possible myriad discoveries in science and technology. So what is to dislike. Now come some interesting insights that examine some of the unintended consequences of the rapid spread of the internet.

Clearly the internet and Google have dealt a mortal blow to the print newspaper industry. There is neither the money nor the persistence, they say, for uncovering of corruption at local and national levels or for the diligent research that underlies the Watergate or Pentagon Papers type scoops. Print journalists decry the bloggers who have replaced them and the internet newspapers sites like Huffington Post for trivializing news and for severely curtailing any investigative journalism. Worse these sites encourage skimming so that the readers barely read the headlines and rarely spend time in delving deeply into any subject. Yet the number of readers of news has increased manifold. But the readers, it is claimed, are sacrificing depth for width.

Have people who love reading books started reading less as a side effect of the internet? It seems to many that people have less patience with the written word and tend to read less deeply. Nicholas Carr opines “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”.

We no longer remember key dates and places and facts anymore. Since nowadays there is so much information, it’s no longer terribly efficient to use our brains to store information. Why memorize the content of a poem or a play when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we can now store it digitally and just remember what we stored and where. I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge- who could do this job for us. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves. In this system we can " outsource the brain" and as David Brooks points out: ” we won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored”. The price we will pay for this outsourcing is that we will know a bit about a lot of things but only a bit in depth of any of these things.

It is argued that another casualty of the internet may be individual creativity. The proponents of internet argue that it has freed them from having to memorize anything since all facts are only a click away on an Iphone or a laptop. Why remember anything when you can call it up on the screen when required? But memorization is not the antithesis of creativity; it is absolutely indispensable to creativity. Creative insights come at odd and unpredictable moments, not when you have all the references spread out on the table in front of you. You can’t possibly hope to have creative insights unless you have memorized all the relevant information. And you can’t hope to have creative insights unless you have memorized a vast amount of information, because you have no way of knowing what might turn out to be useful. So internet and access to Google, while they provide access to a great deal of information at your finger tips, they can also paradoxically reduce your creativity.

So is Google making us stupid? Will digitized books and e-readers devalue the written word? Does reading on the web harm human thinking? Do technologies like Tweet and Twitter simply provide too much too fast? Can you compress knowledge in 140 letters? Are we all about to drown in a informational tidal wave? Don’t get me wrong-- there is so much that the internet and Google have provided us but there are unintended consequences too of all this power.