Recently, I received a message from an email newsletter subscriber asking how the brains of those not connected to the Internet were falling behind those of us who are experiencing global broadband connection.
John Brockman, author of "Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?" and the founder of the online science-and-technology site www.Edge.org, poses this similar question to a varied group of 150 writers, artists, scholars, scientists and pundits. The result is a diffuse but provocative sampling of the ways in which we live with technology today and think about its effects.
Although the sciences are heavily represented among Mr. Brockman's contributors, the volume ranges beyond the usual suspects to include visual artists, architects and musicians whose voices are all too often missing from discussions of technology and contemporary culture. Whether poets or programmers, the book's contributors write from the perspective not of "digital natives" but of creatures from an earlier age who have had to adapt to the changes wrought by the Internet.
Most of the contributors are enthusiastic about the bounty that the Internet provides, particularly to scientific research, global communication and personal expression.
One theme emerges frequently from enthusiasts and skeptics alike: Precisely because there are such vast stores of information on the Internet, the ability to carve out time for uninterrupted, concentrated thought may prove to be the most important skill that one can hone. Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher, argues that the Internet isn't changing the way we think; it is exacerbating the deceptively simple challenge of "attention management." "Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life," he argues.
MIT professor Rodney Brooks, an expert on robotics, worries that the Internet "is stealing our attention. It competes for it with everything else we do." Neuroscientist Brian Knutson imagines a near future in which "the Internet may impose a 'survival of the focused,' in which individuals gifted with some natural ability to stay on target, or who are hopped up on enough stimulants, forge ahead while the rest of us flail helpless in a Web-based attentional vortex."
The substitution of the virtual for the real is another common theme.
Paleontologist Scott Sampson worries about "the loss of intimate experience with the natural world." And computer scientist Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, says that the Internet has "become gripped by reality-denying ideology." Several of the book's contributors, particularly artists and architects, make solid arguments for the importance of unmediated experiences to the creative process.
In the end, the most striking essays in "Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?" encourage us to look back rather than ahead. We are good at storing the past online—the fleeting, trivial past as well as the distant, information-rich past of researched history—but have we improved our ability to learn from it?
Source: The Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2011
John Brockman: Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
