Caught in the Web: how does the Internet affect the way we think?

[Eldritch]

Caught in the web

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The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Net-Delusion-How-Liberate-World/sim/1846143535/2), by Evgeny Morozov, Allen Lane

Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other/dp/B004DL0KW0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297886993&sr=1-1), by Sherry Turkle

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Internet-Changing-Way-You-Think/dp/0062020447/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297887024&sr=8-1-catcorr), edited by John Brockman

The internet has come a long way since Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, turned on the first web server in Geneva on Christmas day 1990.

Today, 2bn people are online; 800m of them are on Facebook.

Every minute, 24 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube.

Google, a company founded only 15 years ago, has a market capitalisation just short of $200bn and a mission statement that it intends “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” – something no one thinks unlikely or even remarkable.

We now bank, shop, communicate, work and date through the internet. The internet has come of age. It is as defining an achievement for humanity as the Enlightenment or the industrial revolution.

But as the web’s youthful potential and teenage brashness give way to a more grown-up, complicated and multifaceted personality, our reaction to it has also changed. Our enthusiasm is tempered by a realisation that it is not simply an exciting force for good, as it was first seen. This year’s opening salvo of books about the internet does not laud web entrepreneurs or predict jetpacks and digital utopia. Instead, Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion and John Brockman’s collection of essays all soberly assess the current state of the internet and ask: are the changes the internet brings to our society and our human nature actually beneficial?

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“We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies,” says Sherry Turkle in her latest book on our relationship with technology, Alone Together, “yet we have allowed them to diminish us.” In this beautifully written, provocative and worrying book, Turkle, a professor at MIT, a clinical psychologist and, perhaps, the world’s leading expert on the social and psychological effects of technology, argues that internet use has as much power to isolate and destroy relationships as it has to bring us together.

Social networks and online communications, Turkle posits, offer such a pleasing simulation of social contact that we commonly mistake it for the real thing. “Virtual places offer connection with uncertain claims to commitment ... People know this, and yet the emotional charge on cyberspace is high. People talk about digital life as ‘the place for hope’, the place where something new will come to them. In the past, one waited for the sound of the post – by carriage, by foot, by truck. Now, when there is a lull, we check our e-mail, texts and messages.”

The compound effect of all these online relationships – the massive global interconnectivity so loved by the cyberutopians – is that “networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone”. The quality of the interaction is the emotional equivalent of junk food; it may fill you up but it hardly nourishes.

Such a danger might have been acceptable when social networks were self-selecting in their membership: the only people capable of getting on to a bulletin board in the mid-1980s had already followed a steep learning curve and weren’t limited in their social lives to the online world. But today, the network is everywhere, and our children are “Digital Natives” who are continually online.

So Turkle rails against what she sees as the falsely consoling effect of cyberspace – whether it is the quality of online relationships or the emotional crutch provided by the scope for endless self-reinvention. “It’s not uncommon,” she writes, “to see people fidget with their smartphones, looking for virtual places where they might once again be more.”

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Whether or not our experience of the internet and the digital world will change us is not in doubt. But not everyone agrees with Turkle’s view that these recent inventions diminish us. In his new book, editor and literary agent John Brockman has collected answers from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Brian Eno to a single question originally posed on his website, Edge.org (http://www.edge.org/): “Is the internet changing the way you think?” The 164 contributors are as thoughtful as commentators at the web’s imminent 21st birthday ought to be. Hope, that cyberutopian hallmark, spreads throughout this book.

As W Daniel Hillis, the legendary computer scientist, says in his response to the question, when we’re faced with a world of unimagined digital complexity, we must admit that: “We have embodied our rationality within our machines and delegated to them many of our choices, and in this process we have created a world that is beyond our own understanding ... We have linked our destinies, not only among ourselves across the globe, but with our technology. If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence, our own theme is interdependence. We are now all connected, humans and machines.”

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But as Evgeny Morozov, a young researcher at Georgetown University, says in his piercing new book The Net Delusion, the role of Twitter in the Iranian protests was as short and fleeting as a tweet itself. According to a study by international news network al-Jazeera quoted by Morozov, there were only 60 active Twitter accounts in the entire country before the summer’s unrest. When the Iranian authorities clamped down on the internet, provoked as much by the western hype as anything, that number dropped to six. The fact that Iran was a “trending topic” on Twitter wasn’t a reflection of true revolutionaries at work: it merely amplified a hopeful echo chamber in the west.

Continue reading. (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2a75e358-2a63-11e0-804a-00144feab49a.html#axzz1CQa1jnUJ)

[Eldritch]

Some more from the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/22/internet-learn-to-turn-off):


Given the subject I thought it wise to engage in a little light crowd-sourcing, floating that question on Twitter. As if to vindicate the "wisdom of crowds" thesis often pressed by internet cheerleaders, the range of responses mirrored precisely the arguments raised in the expert essays collected by editor John Brockman in the new book.

There are the idealists, grateful for a tool that has enabled them to think globally. They are now plugged into a range of sources, access to which would once have required effort, expense and long delays. It's not just faraway information that is within reach, but faraway people – activists are able to connect with like-minded allies on the other side of the world. As Newsnight's Paul Mason noted recently: "During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these."

It's this possibility of cross-border collaboration that has the internet gurus excited, as they marvel at open-source efforts such as the Linux computer operating system, with knowledge traded freely across the globe. Richard Dawkins even imagines a future when such co-operation is so immediate, so reflexive, that our combined intelligence comes to resemble a single nervous system: "A human society would effectively become one individual," he writes.

No less hopeful are the egalitarians who believe the internet, and social media in particular, have flattened the old hierarchies that put purveyors of information at the top of the pyramid and consumers down below. "I think that social boundaries have become more porous," mused one tweeter. "Without it I wouldn't be able to have this informal chat with you." The end of deference is a theme, with several suggesting that where once they had to believe what they were told, they can now check for themselves.

But in my unscientific survey the Pollyannas were outnumbered by the Cassandras, even among people whose Twitter habit might suggest internet zeal. There were laments for what more than one essayist in the anthology calls the "outsourcing of the mind". As a respondent to my Twitter appeal put it: "Sadly I think less and google more."

Others raised the now hoary question of anonymity and its tendency to remove the usual social inhibitions that encourage courtesy. Just as the car windscreen makes people ruder than they would ever dare to be exposed as mere pedestrians, so the presence of a computer screen can release a darker side, coarsening relations between strangers. For reasons not yet fully understood, the internet seems to have robbed many of embarrassment.

But these were mere side notes. The biggest complaint, in both my Twitter sample and the expert essays, was about the quality of thinking in the online era. What the internet has done, say the dissenters, is damage our ability to concentrate for sustained periods. Being connected meant being constantly tempted to look away, to hop from the text in front of you to another, newer one. One tweeter replied that he now thought "about more things for shorter amounts of time. It's like ADHD." Anyone who has Tweetdeck fitted on their desktop, chirruping like a toddler tapping you on the shoulder urging you to come and play, will know what he means.

This, the worriers fear, is not just irritating; it might even damage our civilisation. How capable will people be of creating great works if they are constantly interrupted, even when alone? "What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," angsts Nicholas Carr, who believes the internet is steering us toward "the shallows".

Now there are even devices available that limit internet access to prevent you getting too distracted. The writer Jay Rayner responded to my poll by confessing he'd recently rented a house with no connection to get some work done, adding that the internet "actively stops me thinking". And he's not the only one to have taken such drastic action.

But it goes beyond mere distraction. The nature of the work itself changes. One tweeter complained of the internet producing "Pot Noodle knowledge", instant and thin. The online bias toward the immediate is strong, forcing us into a permanent "now", weakening our sensitivity to the past and even to the future. If John F Kennedy urged us to have two separate in-trays on our desks – one marked "urgent" and the other "important" – the internet is blurring the distinction.

The impact of all this is not confined to the quality of intellectual inquiry. It's affecting family life, too. I recall the friend who saw a counsellor for advice about his disruptive children. Diagnosis: they were playing up to wrest attention from parents who had one eye forever on the BlackBerry. Some couples report tension, with one constantly tweeting while watching television or even during dinner. That's not so much a third person in the marriage as an entire crowd.

The result, says essayist Douglas Rushkoff, is that the internet has made him "resentful and short-fused", stressed by the pressure to be available and to respond now. "It's as if the relentless demand of networks for me to be everywhere, all the time, were denying me access to the moment in which I am really living," he writes plaintively.

But he has a valuable insight. It's not the internet itself that's doing this. It's the advent particularly of mobile technology, of the smartphone, turning the internet from an occasional, "opt-in" activity to what Rushkoff calls an "'always on' condition of my life". The internet is no longer just on your desk, but in your pocket, nagging you to stop what you're doing and pay attention.

We cannot turn back time. Nor, given the internet's power for good currently on display around the Middle East, should we want to. But we need to reassert control. We need, in short, to rediscover the off switch.