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Is it potentially dangerous to have all this information at our fingertips?

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What are the disadvantages of the internet?

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What are the benefits of the internet?

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In his new book, " Smarter Than You Think," journalist Clive Thompson argues that the digital revolution - from search engine sophistication to status update proliferation - is actually dovetailing with how the human brain naturally works to make us better thinkers.

Thompson is no latter day Cassandra (or, for that matter, Nicholas Carr), warning that new technology will rob us of our capacity to concentrate, create or text in complete sentences. A technology reporter for Wired and The New York Times Magazine, he is an enthusiastic and optimistic cheerleader for new technology.

Thompson recently spoke with Digiday about how new technology is changing the way we think, learn and remember - and why that's a good thing for brands and people alike. Excerpts:

Why is it that there have been more books that rail against the deleterious effects of digital technology than there are those like this, that celebrate it?
Some of those books were a useful correction. There was this naive sense 10 years ago as we started using the Internet a lot more that multitasking was a really great thing, that when we were doing seven things at once, we were somehow operating at the peak of our capabilities. Some of the reaction was good. It was literally saying, "No, our minds don't work that way. Distraction is a bad thing." At the same time, a lot of that hand-wringing stuff is based in a combination of nostalgia for how intellectually awesome people were before the Internet came along.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't "intellectually awesome" before the Internet.
There were plenty of people who were shallow and trivial and not interested in the long-form thought. But I would say that 50 percent of the op-ed pieces dissing the Internet are written by novelists like Jonathan Franzen: They have jobs that require you to sit in a room for three years with no interruptions or social interaction. That downplays how much real-world thinking is deeply social. I don't think they understand how catalytic and exciting and mind-opening it's been for everyone else to suddenly be able to connect and talk with global audiences. We bat around ideas, work as teams, collaborate.

It's not technology itself that's making us smarter, though, is it? It's how we approach it and use it.
This is a really good point. The Internet rewards the curious. I don't think it has as many positive effects on the incurious. If you just go there to follow Justin Beiber around, it's not necessarily going to expand your intellectual world. No disrespect to Justin Beiber. One of the interesting things about the Internet is that it makes conversation visible.

Doesn't that create a lot of flotsam?
The really good stuff does tend to float to the top. People with the biggest followerships don't get retweeted the most. The stuff that gets really retweeted is the work of real experts in their fields. They built their followership organically, unlike Oprah who just shows up and gets 9 million followers.

Is that bad news for brands, though?
How do you have a conversation with people when you are a corporate entity? It's really not easy. People really prize the sense of personal connection. They respond deeply to that authenticity that they're actually talking to another person. Who exactly is the forward face of JetBlue or Sprint?

But brands can be helpful on Twitter, at least. People tweet at companies all the time when they have a problem.
Exactly. That's the problem. Something for companies to think about is that conversation doesn't really scale. You can have a conversation with a constrained number of people online. Once you have a zillion followers, it's really hard to interact with them. There's just too many.

You write about the democratizing effects of social media. Can't the same Twitter that fosters revolution in, say, Egypt be used as a tool by despots?
Absolutely, though I would argue that the individual citizens have been much more empowered by online tools than the state, because the state always had fantastic organization and broadcasting technology and the citizenry basically had none. The power of the citizen increased a thousandfold. The state's power maybe increased by tenfold. But the despots gleefully scoop up the utterances of activists online and are using it to target them.

"Target" is an interesting word. It's also what advertisers do to reach people online.
I am frankly less worried about corporate targeting than government targeting. Corporations can do some pretty bad things, but they don't have the power of the leviathan state to throw you in jail. The problem you see is with insurance companies turning you down because they can see you're smoking in a picture on Facebook. I don't see anything as evil or scary in corporations as what the NSA is doing.

But some of them are in cahoots with the NSA.
It's less that they're in cahoots than you have the migration of private speech onto public sector servers. It's an architecture problem.

How does simply having an online audience improve the way individuals or brands communicate?
When you start to go from thinking privately to thinking in public, throwing an idea before other people, you suddenly have to take yourself and what you're working on way more seriously. The best corporations that I've talked to have established strong internal cultures of encouraging public thought. Whether that's where people are encouraged to talk out loud about the problems they're facing and questions they're dealing with. Or whether it's IBM which has its own social network to encourage people to share what they're working on. You definitely get this big overall jump in the quality of the thinking.

As a result, there's been this massive explosion of creativity online, yet there's no precedent for how to preserve it all.
Frankly, a lot of it is going to vanish, and that's really tragic. A vast majority of stuff vanishes because companies go under. Geocities goes under, and everything is gone. When Facebook goes under - and it will - what's going to happen to all that stuff? The fact is that there's a huge amount of interesting culture out there that's going to die.

So, back up your stuff?
I will say we are getting better at preserving the stuff we want to preserve. Everyday people are now grappling with stuff archivists always did. What's the good stuff we need to keep and how? The problem is that we're crappy judges in the here-and-now of what's going to be significant in the future.

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The Internet Is Making You Smarter, Really - Digiday

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In his new book, " Smarter Than You Think," journalist Clive Thompson argues that the digital revolution - from search engine sophistication to status update proliferation - is actually dovetailing with how the human brain naturally works to make us better thinkers.

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Our minds are under attack. At least that's what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world," he wrote, "it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."

I have a hard time taking these Cassandras of the Computer Age seriously. For one thing, they are much more interested in our fears than in the facts. In his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, the English linguist David Crystal demonstrates that many of the dire warnings about texting are little more than urban legends. Texting doesn't lead to bad spelling, he finds. In fact, Crystal writes, "texting actually improves your literacy, as it gives you more practice in reading and writing."

More significantly, the ominous warnings feed on a popular misconception of how the mind works. We tend to think of the mind as separated from the world; we imagine information trickling into our senses and reaching our isolated minds, which then turn that information into a detailed picture of reality. The Internet and iPhones seem to be crashing the gate of the mind, taking over its natural work and leaving it to wither away to a mental stump. As plausible as this picture may seem, it does a bad job of explaining a lot of recent scientific research. In fact, the mind appears to be adapted for reaching out from our heads and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. In the journal Analysis, they published a short essay called "The Extended Mind" in which they asked a simple question: "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?" Most people might answer, "At the skull." But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.

The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

Clark and Chalmers asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there's an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain's memory network. Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer's. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can't access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.

In the view of Clark and Chalmers, Inga's brain-based memory and Otto's notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga's mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain, while Otto's mind draws on information stored in his notebook. The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn't make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA's address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too. Clark and Chalmers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.

Eleven years later, this argument continues to trigger fierce debate among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There is no doubt that the extended mind is a weird concept. One reason it seems so strange is that our minds feel as if they are really totally self-contained. We innately believe, for example, that as we walk down a street, we are continuously filming a detailed movie of our surroundings and using that mental movie to decide what to do next. But like many beliefs we have about ourselves, this movie is an illusion. Our awareness is, in fact, remarkably narrow.

One of the most spectacular demonstrations of how oblivious we can be was carried out by psychologists Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chabris at Harvard University. They asked people to watch a video of students weaving around each other and passing a basketball. Half the students wore white shirts, the other half black. The subjects had to keep track of how many times the ball was passed by members of one of the teams. In the middle of the game, a gorilla (rather, a student in a gorilla costume) sauntered through the scene. Many subjects later reported that they never saw the gorilla; their brains discarded it as extraneous.

Inside our heads, instead of making a perfect replica of the world, we focus our attention on tiny snippets, darting our eyes from point to point. We extract only the information we need for whatever task is at hand, whether we're sorting the laundry or climbing a mountain.

We use strikingly little information in the process. Dana Ballard, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, developed a computer game to measure just how little. He showed his subjects a pattern of colored blocks in the upper left-hand corner of the computer monitor. He then had them build a similar pattern of blocks in the lower left-hand corner. To do so, the players used a mouse to grab blocks, one by one, from a collection on the right-hand side of the screen. As the players looked from the original model to the collection of blocks to their own growing pattern, Ballard tracked their eye movements. He found that players looked at the model at the upper left before they picked up a block, and then again afterward. His experiments suggest that in each glance, the players were storing only a single piece of information. The first time they noted a block's color. The second time they noted its position in the model. Instead of keeping a detailed picture of the blocks in mind, people extracted just tiny scraps of information on a need-to-know basis.

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Our minds are under attack. At least that's what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"

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How often do you take time to think of an answer rather than Googling it immediately?

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What are you thinking right now? In the past, thought tended to be more of a private affair. Perhaps that's part of the reason why some believe that creativity only comes from sitting alone, staring into space.

Yet, as author and journalist Clive Thompson points out, big ideas only come into the world when we share our thinking with others. As he argues in his recent book Smarter Than You Think, bouncing around thoughts and sharing knowledge can boost our brains.

Years ago, Thompson feared the internet would just result in everyone being drowned in trivia and gossip. But from instant messaging to social networks, every time a new technology has come along he has found people doing interesting, creative and strange things that he could never have predicted. People were using them in ways that helped them to think in different ways, to learn new things and to solve problems they couldn't have solved before.

Many of the successful tools in the last 10 years are ones that have enhanced pre-existing modes of thought. The reason why people love seeing what other people are doing or thinking on the likes of Facebook or Twitter is that we love doing it offline - we're social animals.

And that is why, he says, the internet in the 21st Century has become a humongous idea-making machine. Never before have we been able to disseminate our ideas with so many people, all over the world.

So while it might be hard to see how spending all day on Facebook can be a good thing, Thompson argues that logging on could help spark a little bit of genius in us all.
Clive Thompson spoke to BBC Future at SXSW Interactive in Austin Texas.
If you would like to comment on this video or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our or page, or message us on .

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Social media: How life online makes us smarter

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What are you thinking right now? In the past, thought tended to be more of a private affair. Perhaps that's part of the reason why some believe that creativity only comes from sitting alone, staring into space. Yet, as author and journalist Clive Thompson points out, big ideas only come into the world when we share our thinking with others.

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Is Technology Making Us Smarter or Dumber?

For many people, it's terrifying to go a day-heck, a few hours-without their smartphones. Is this unprecedented access to technology improving human intelligence, or fueling a mindless dependency? On one hand, classrooms all over the world can accomplish more because of new tech. On the other hand, everyone seems to be more distracted than ever, which makes it hard to harness higher intelligence. It all boils down to one question: is technology making us smarter or dumber? Don't ask Siri. We already tried.

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For many people, it's terrifying to go a day-heck, a few hours-without their smartphones. Is this unprecedented access to technology improving human intelligence, or fueling a mindless dependency? On one hand, classrooms all over the world can accomplish more because of new tech.

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Is this happening to us? And is it good? Assembly line illustration from shutterstock.com

The smartphone in your hand enables you to record a video, edit it and send it around the world. With your phone, you can navigate in cities, buy a car, track your vital signs and accomplish thousands of other tasks. And so?

Each of those activities used to demand learning specific skills and acquiring the necessary resources to do them. Making a film? First, get a movie camera and the supporting technologies (film, lights, editing equipment). Second, learn how to use them and hire a crew. Third, shoot the movie. Fourth, develop and edit the film. Fifth, make copies and distribute them.

Now all of those tasks are solved by technology. We need no longer learn the intricate details when the smartphone programmers have taken care of so much. But filmmakers are now freer to focus on their craft, and it is easier than ever to become a filmmaker. Historically, technology has made us individually dumber and individually smarter - and collectively smarter. Technology has made us able to do more while understanding less about what we are doing, and has increased our dependence on others.

These are not recent trends, but part of the history of technology since the first humans began to farm. In recent decades, three major changes have accelerated the process, starting with the increasing pace of humans specializing in particular skills. In addition, we outsource more skills to technological tools, like a movie-making app on a smartphone, that relieve us of the challenge of learning large amounts of technical knowledge. And many more people have access to technology than in the past, allowing them to use these tools much more readily.

Specialized knowledge

Specialization enables us to become very good at some activities, but that investment in learning - for example, how to be an ER nurse or computer coder - comes at the expense of other skills like how to grow your own food or build your own shelter.

Adam Smith Business School, CC BY-SA

As Adam Smith noted in his 1776 "Wealth of Nations," specialization enables people to become more efficient and productive at one set of tasks, but with a trade-off of increased dependence on others for additional needs. In theory, everyone benefits.

Specialization has moral and pragmatic consequences. Skilled workers are more likely to be employed and earn more than their unskilled counterparts. One reason the United States won World War II was that draft boards kept some trained workers, engineers and scientists working on the home front instead of sending them to fight. A skilled machine tool operator or oil-rig roustabout contributed more to winning the war by staying at home and sticking to a specialized role than by heading to the front with a rifle. It also meant other men (and some women) donned uniforms and had a much greater chance of dying.

Making machines for the rest of us

Incorporating human skills into a machine - called "blackboxing" because it makes the operations invisible to the user - allows more people to, for example, take a blood pressure measurement without investing the time, resources and effort into learning the skills previously needed to use a blood pressure cuff. Putting the expertise in the machine lowers the barriers to entry for doing something because the person does not need to know as much. For example, contrast learning to drive a car with a manual versus an automatic transmission.

U.S. Army/SPC Austin Berner

Mass production of blackboxed technologies enables their widespread use. Smartphones and automated blood pressure monitors would be far less effective if only thousands instead of tens of millions of people could use them. Less happily, producing tens of millions of automatic rifles like AK-47s means individuals can kill far more people far more easily compared with more primitive weapons like knives.

More practically, we depend on others to do what we cannot do at all or as well. City dwellers in particular depend on vast, mostly invisible structures to provide their power, remove their waste and ensure food and tens of thousands of other items are available.

Overreliance on technology is dangerous

A major downside of increased dependence on technologies is the increased consequences if those technologies break or disappear. Lewis Dartnell's "The Knowledge" offers a delightful (and frightening) exploration of how survivors of a humanity-devastating apocaplyse could salvage and maintain 21st-century technologies.

U.S. Navy/PM3 M. Jeremie Yoder

Just one example of many is that the U.S. Naval Academy just resumed training officers to navigate by sextants. Historically the only way to determine a ship's location at sea, this technique is being taught again both as a backup in case cyberattackers interfere with GPS signals and to give navigators a better feel of what their computers are doing.

How do people survive and prosper in this world of increasing dependence and change? It's impossible to be truly self-reliant, but it is possible to learn more about the technologies we use, to learn basic skills of repairing and fixing them (hint: always check the connections and read the manual) and to find people who know more about particular topics. In this way the Internet's vast wealth of information can not only increase our dependence but also decrease it (of course, skepticism about online information is never a bad idea). Thinking about what happens if something goes wrong can be a useful exercise in planning or a descent into obsessive worrying.

Individually, we depend more on our technologies than ever before - but we can do more than ever before. Collectively, technology has made us smarter, more capable and more productive. What technology has not done is make us wiser.
Editor's note: This article was part of a collaboration with Point Taken, a program from WGBH that aired on PBS. The show features fact-based debate on major issues of the day, without the shouting.

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Is technology making us dumber or smarter? Yes

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The smartphone in your hand enables you to record a video, edit it and send it around the world. With your phone, you can navigate in cities, buy a car, track your vital signs and accomplish thousands of other tasks. And so?

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Though it may not always feel like it, the Internet is actually making us smarter, at least according to a new survey of scientists, business leaders, and technology developers.

A collection of 900 experts interviewed for the Pew Internet report The Future of the Internet IV, released last Friday, were asked their views on how the Internet is affecting us--now and in another 10 years. Though most felt that the Internet can and would improve our reading, writing, and overall grasp of knowledge, some were reluctant to jump on that bandwagon.

"Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge," said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center, in a statement. "There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia, and other online tools."

In the summer of 2008, writer Nick Carr wrote a controversial article for The Atlantic entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Pew Internet asked the same question of its panel of experts.

Most disagreed with the premise that browsing and skimming through Web sites is lowering our ability to concentrate. Some said that Google makes us more informed and creative. Others said sites like Google make us intellectually lazy. And for many, the answer was not as simple as the question.

"Google will make us stupid and intelligent at the same time," wrote Dutch Futurist Marcel Bullinga. "In the future, we will live in a transparent 3D mobile media cloud that surrounds us everywhere. In this cloud, we will use intelligent machines, to whom we delegate both simple and complex tasks. Therefore, we will lose the skills we needed in the old days...But we will gain the skill to make better choices...All in all, I think the gains outweigh the losses."

Pew Internet

The report also looked at responses to other key questions.

Will the Internet enhance or weaken our reading and writing skills? Though 65 percent of respondents felt that such skills are improving thanks to the Net, some experts decried the quick, throwaway style of writing found on the Web, e-mails, and instant messages. But again, many saw both the pros and cons of the Internet's effects on our reading, writing, and comprehension.

"Spelling and grammar have gotten worse. People don't think things through or edit as much before publishing or sending as they once did," wrote Rebecca MacKinnon of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. "But on the other hand, the Internet has improved my Chinese reading and writing ability. The hyperlink enables me to communicate in non-linear ways that adds layers of meaning to my writing that could not exist on paper. The fact that I can mix visuals, sound, and text when making an argument or telling a story often enhances the effectiveness of my work."

The survey also asked whether most of the upcoming hot inventions have already been anticipated, or will many come from "out of the blue?" Most of the experts felt that the gadgets and applications destined to capture our imaginations in another 10 years will be unexpected, even by today's smartest innovators. But again, many qualified their answers and offered their own ideas on what we might see by 2020.

"The correct answer is a combination of the two," wrote MIT professor David Clark. "I think in the 'device' space we can see much of what will happen over the next few years: the ubiquitous availability of sensors and actuators, the cyber-car, various sorts of implants and proto-cyborg elements. But the application space is harder to predict."

Pew Internet

Will the Internet still be free and unfettered in 2020, or will there be more control of information? On this issue, 61 percent of the experts believe the Internet's basic principles of free and open access of information will prevail. Some took a more pessimistic tone, fearing that nations like China and Iran will continue to try to retain power by controlling Internet access, and that vendors and corporations will increasingly limit access to users. But many were more split down the middle.

"It seems to me inevitable that nation states will attempt to exert more control over the Internet," wrote , chief economist at Google. "However, I think that these will be relatively small changes, so that the internet will remain relatively free."

Finally, will we still be able to remain relatively anonymous online in 2020? Here, the results were more mixed--only 55 percent of respondents said that most people will still be able to create, communicate, and browse on the Net without revealing who they are. But again, many were less optimistic.

"Online anonymity is under threat and is unlikely to remain substantially the same in the next decade" said Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices. "While there are excellent, compelling reasons to ensure that anonymous speech is possible on the Internet, there's a concerted effort to eliminate anonymity to address concerns about criminal behavior, fraud, spam, and terrorism. Because there's not an organized anonymity lobby, I fear this is a battle the anonymous will lose."

Pew Internet

This latest report was the fourth in a series of Internet studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. The results were culled from responses by 895 different Internet experts, who received questions via email, Twitter, or Facebook.

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The Internet can make you smarter, experts say

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Though it may not always feel like it, the Internet is actually making us smarter, at least according to a new survey of scientists, business leaders, and technology developers. A collection of 900 experts interviewed for the Pew Internet report The Future of the Internet IV, released last Friday, were asked their views on how the Internet is affecting us--now and in another 10 years.

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Lots of commentators -- like my old friend Nicholas Carr, for example -- have bemoaned the rise of the Internet, and before that television, arguing that these evil distractions have shortened our attention spans and caused us to become digital idiots, capable of only the briefest moments of focus. Email, too, has come in for its share of blame and experts have recommended that you schedule it, or ration it, or avoid it altogether.

But all of this handwringing is missing the real point. It's not that we're becoming dumber, it's rather that the object of our focus has changed. In one way, we're actually getting smarter - much, much smarter.

Here's what's going on. Society - work, entertainment, and the arts - have been shifting from print to visual at a rapidly accelerating rate over the past half-century years. In the past decade, with the rise of broadband and the Internet, the shift has moved into high gear.

We're only just beginning to learn how to create, present, and absorb information in visual terms. We're like the first producers and readers of books as they became mass-producible with the advent of the printing press. Eventually, the press led to all sorts of novel ways to present printed information, and even art forms such as the novel.

Now we're in the same early stages of the visual information explosion. YouTube is primitive, but powerful. Our ability to absorb visual information is accelerating rapidly. If you compare video - and movies - of the last few years with a movie from the 1940s, the difference in visual density and pacing is astonishing.

We're learning a new language and a new medium. We can now handle visual shortcuts and codes that would have baffled us even 20 years ago. If you need proof of this, compare a TV show from the 70s to one today. That difference in pacing alone is remarkable.

And it's simply not true that the Internet has caused us to be unable to handle longer forms of information and entertainment. Whatever you may think of Lost, or 24, or Homeland, the fact remains that these are long-form stories and require the viewer to be able to keep track of plot lines and characters every bit as complicated and dense as, say, Charles Dickens' Bleak House. The difference is that the former are visually presented whereas the latter is print-based.

So the next time someone tells you that the Internet is making us stupid, respond that our visual syntax and grammar is more sophisticated than it has ever been. Print, maybe, is going away. But video is here to stay, and is rapidly becoming more and more powerful a medium of storytelling and information-sharing.

Of course, the implications for all forms of corporate and individual communications are immense. More to come in future blog posts.

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Why the Internet Is Making Us Smarter--in One Way

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Lots of commentators -- like my old friend Nicholas Carr, for example -- have bemoaned the rise of the Internet, and before that television, arguing that these evil distractions have shortened our attention spans and caused us to become digital idiots, capable of only the briefest moments of focus.

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Now that knowledge is moving onto its roomy, new, hyperlinked medium, we're beginning to see how much of what we took for granted about knowledge was really due to the limitations of its old paper medium. Knowledge is going from limited to unlimited, from settled to unsettled, from content to connection, from libraries to networks.

This is not an unmixed blessing. But we hear enough about how the Net is making us stupid and is the destroyer of civilization. So, here are thirteen ways the Net is making us smarter.
David Weinberger's Too Big To Know (Basic Books, $25.99) is out now.

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13 Reasons You Should Spend More Time On The Internet

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Now that knowledge is moving onto its roomy, new, hyperlinked medium, we're beginning to see how much of what we took for granted about knowledge was really due to the limitations of its old paper medium. Knowledge is going from limited to unlimited, from settled to unsettled, from content to connection, from libraries to networks.

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Is the Internet making us stupid?
Whenever a new major technology comes around, it's an obligatory question. Is it good for us or is it making us worse off?

Throughout the centuries, Nicholas Carr explains in his book The Shallows, human thought has been shaped by "tools of the mind." The alphabet, maps, the printing press, the clock and, today, the computer.

There's little question, as you'll see in a moment, that the Internet is changing us. As did all of our past "tools of the mind."

But this time, have we gone too far? Is the World Wide Web making us smarter or more stupid? Stronger or weaker? Freer or more enslaved?

Are we controlling it... or does what we control control us, too?

We'll get to the answer (if there is such a thing) in just one moment.

First. let's begin with a quick story...
While Friedrich Nietzsche is revered as an intellectual giant today - 'Für Allen und Keinen'; (For everyone and no-one) - he was nothing of the sort in his own day.
It was only after he passed away, in fact, did people start to take the man seriously. This is for several reasons.

For starters, he was largely a career failure. Though he became a professor in his salad days, at the young age of 24, he was castigated by his peers for his wild beliefs and forced to retire by 35.
The Original Hipster: Obscene fits of moustache, before it was cool
Worse, the small animal on his face (aka his moustache) afforded him no satisfaction from the ladies, often only serving to frighten them off.

He was also extremely impulsive and prone to mental breakdowns, which, unfortunately, wasn't exactly en vogue at the time (if only he'd instead lived through today's celebrity culture... he'd fit right in).

As the most dramatic example, in Turin, Italy, Nietzsche was walking along when he noticed a man beating a horse. He flipped out and immediately ran over to hold the horse and protect it from the beast.

This single event, strangely, marked the beginning of the end for old Nietzsche. After the encounter with the horse, he was never the same.

Immediately upon returning home from his horse-driven moment of madness, for example, he danced around the house naked and openly contemplated killing the Kaiser.
Tragic, yes. But let's rewind back to just before Nietzsche had his famed encounter with the horse and went bonkers. Back to the moment when Nietzsche accidentally made one of the most prescient insights in history. One that few people have noticed up until now.
He then later started to believe himself to be Jesus, Napoleon, Buddha, and many other historical figures. It wasn't long until his family, tired of his antics, tossed him into the asylum. The very place where, 11 years later, he would die.

At the age of 34, Nietzsche's vision started failing. Keeping his eyes focused on a page, or even a word, or even a letter was becoming an exhausting task. Oftentimes it didn't take long for his struggle to read and write to devolve into painful fits of migraines and vomiting.

Before long, he was beginning to realize, he may have to give up writing altogether.

"At wit's end," Nicholas Carr writes in The Shallows, "he ordered a typewriter - a Danish made Malling-Hansen Writing Ball - and it was delivered to his lodgings during the first weeks of 1882. Invented a few years earlier by Hans Rasmus Johan Malling-Hansen, the principal of the Royal Institute for the Deaf Mute in Copenhagen, the writing ball was an oddly beautiful instrument.

"It resembled an ornate golden pincushion. Fifty-two keys, for capital and lowercase letters as well as numerals and punctuation marks, protruded from the top of the ball in a concentric sheet of typing paper."

Once the oddball became familiar with the odd ball, Nietzsche resumed his writing, but now with his eyes closed.

"In March," Carr writes, "a Berlin newspaper reported that Nietzsche 'feels better than ever' and, thanks to his typewriter, 'has resumed his writing activities.'

"But the device had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche's closest friends, the writer and composer Heinrich Koselitz, noticed a change in the style of his writing. Nietzsche's prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine's power - its 'iron' - was, through some mystical metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page.

"Perhaps," Koselitz wrote in a letter to Nietzsche, "you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom, my 'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of the pen and paper."
Which brings us back to the original question: If Nietzsche's writing ball can take part in forming his thoughts, what effect does the Internet have on ours?
"You are right," Nietzsche tapped back in response. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts."

Our brains, we are finding, aren't just "plastic."

They are now described by the world-renowned neuroscientist Michael Merzenich as "massively plastic." And although this plasticity might slow down a bit as we age, contrary to previously popular thought, it never truly stops until we croak.

Moreover, neuroscientists are beginning to prove what Marshall McLuhan already pointed out in the '60s: "the medium is the message." Meaning, the technology we use to find and share information changes the way our brains process information.

And in the digital age, this could come with a few unseen consequences.

If you want to dive deep into how the Internet might be eroding our capacities for concentration, contemplation and reflection, read Carr's book. (That is, if you can get through it without being interrupted by Twitter feeds and Facebook updates. The struggle is real.)

If, on the other edge of the coin, you want to see how the constant barrage of screens is affecting your personal freedom and liberty, read our featured article below by Bill Buppert of the ZeroGov blog.

How the Internet could be killing critical thinking and human connection...

Why you're an enemy of the state if you don't have a screen attached to your retinas at all times...

And how to find a semblance of balance between the digitized world and a brain that's not quite used to it...

Today, Buppert's going to rap about...

Read on...

Reading Is Fundamental to Freedom

By Bill Buppert

You are an enemy of the state if you don't remain connected all the time.

Like airplane fuselages on American flagged carriers and Federal installations, your benevolent government wants you monitored at all times and subject to unlimited search and seizure of person and property at every juncture if they wish.

The pocket radio, a Belmont Boulevard, appeared on the market in 1949. Unlike the odd Communist world fascination with loudspeakers at every block throughout the other evil empires, the device revolutionized commerce. Once the Walkman debuted in 1979, one could now complement the portability of receiving radio transmissions with recorded music on the cassette medium to be succeeded by CDs later on.

I would mark the middle of the twentieth century as the beginning of the end for mass purposeful reading of books, newspapers and magazines in America. It has simply gotten progressively worse since then.

Reading doesn't take place until you take your eyes off the page; in other words, reflection and contemplation are important cognitive processes. Genius has been defined as an interdisciplinary connection of heretofore unrelated data points or conjecture.
Nicholas Carr: "Even the earliest silent readers recognized the striking change in their consciousness that took place as they immersed themselves in the pages of a book. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria described how, whenever he read to himself, "as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of my memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart." Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn't involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, or the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was - and is - the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading."
Critical thinking is hard but not complex. In essence, critical thinking is thinking about thinking to improve your thinking through better thinking. A lifelong project best started at a tender age.

The four levels of reading championed by Mortimer Adler provided one with a critical thinking toolkit to assess and quite literally change the world around you through the act of absorbing someone else's worldview and perspective through your own critical lens and confirmation bias..

I think it is no mean coincidence that reading happened to coincide with the rather thoughtful revolutions against the state that took place when the Enlightenment started to reduce the edifice of the church/state monopoly that had been the way of human civilization for thousands of years. The practice of " silent reading " became the transformative event in human society.

Deep reading is what gave us most of the benefits of modern society today much like the very notion of an individual mind is what gives substance to ideas..

The mass reading phenomenon was inaugurated in the West in the fifteenth century and gained significant steam after that period. Fischer's treatment of the History of Reading provides a much better road map on this from a global perspective than this brief jeremiad will bother with. One just needs to consider that the transmission of the written text in this form was the most revolutionary means possible to create these information conduits to deliver mass self-education for those who bothered to do so.

The electronic revolution that has occurred since 1949 in communication is unprecedented and critically dangerous to individual liberty and freedom.

That small Belmont (to be succeeded by transistor radios in a few years) inaugurated a perfect opportunity to begin the cognitive slide that a retreat from purposeful reading, an active form of critical thinking to a more refined level, will create.

Electronic mediums like radio and television (why do you think they call it programming) are passive acquisition transmissions of information. And while the online phenomenon does create active participation in thinking to a certain extent, undisciplined access to the Internet can lead to the same phenomenon of the friends you know who will sit in front of the glass teat and flip channels obsessively for hours.

It also creates the idee fixe all of us observe of people constantly connected to screens. And this dependence on screens for all waking hours is eroding important aspects of people's thinking abilities that if lost, may be hard to retrieve once relinquished.

William Powers speaks to this in his brilliant book, Hamlet's Blackberry: "And we're losing something of great value, a way of thinking and moving through time that can be summed up in a single word: depth. Depth of thought and feeling, depth in our relationships, our work and everything we do. Since depth is what makes life fulfilling and meaningful, it's astounding that we're allowing this to happen."

This is no more far-fetched than what other observers are opining about the devolution of brain function as a tool-set to apprehend and change the world.

Nicholas Carr speaks to this adroitly: "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

In combination with other screens and the ubiquitous if not emerging seamless connections with the Internet for cell phones and other Bluetooth-like technologies that make even the car a thought-free zone.

I don't have a Facebook account nor will I ever but I am also inclined to a monastic predisposition for social interaction. I recharge in my own company. For those of you who use Facebook or other social connection mediums, at the end of the day, what is achieved of merit? There is a whimsical and almost masturbatory infatuation with it. I experienced this with Twitter when my book editor recommended I use it as a cutting edge tool to promote my books. I quite literally had to carve out specific times I would be on it and simply not check it for large blocks of time.

I am convinced that the compulsion with screens of every type is actively disengaging humans from each other and vigorously diminishing people's ability to employ critical thinking skills.

That's bad enough.

Now match that phenomenon to the widespread and wholesale vacuuming of ALL information in the electronic ether by the usual suspects in Western governments. They can simply store the metadata and when a decision is taken to create a dossier on an enemy of the state, ex post facto, they simply assemble all the aggregated data points connected in unison on the different devices people use not to mention the association networks with people they communicated with.

And the state is the enemy of all freedom and liberty, the apex predator of individual moral agency.

We haven't had broadcast TV in the house since the mid 1990s and we are happy for it because it eliminated a major distraction to home educating our children and I wouldn't do it otherwise.

We do stream and while I have a huge music collection on both electrons and CDs, it provides the background ambiance for activities such as writing (I am listening to Peter Gabriel's Passion as I type this, my favorite scribbling muse). I also try to limit the amount of time I spend on the internet and read several hours a day if I have the time.

I still use a dumb phone so I cannot be connected to a screen. Yes, I use a Faraday bag when visiting with friends.

When we take road trips, we'll listen to recorded books.

It keeps my brain functioning to do what it was built for: critically apprehending the world around me to inform my behavior and moral decision-making.

Timothy Leary was right: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

If you take one thing away from this brief philippic, just do it. Inventory your life and determine if the screens are a bane to your existence and if so, take action.

Your screens are building a crystal prison that you live in whether knowingly and oblivious to the fact.

[Chris' note: The irony of questioning the Almighty Screen in a newsletter that can only be read on one isn't lost on us. But, to be clear, we're neither Pollyannaish or Malthusian about the rise of technology. We don't think that the Internet signifies the downfall of humanity and, in fact, believe that many great things have - and will - come out of our interconnected world. That being said, balance is important in the years to come. We're becoming more and more acquainted with what direction technology is headed. And the implications of some of it, to be completely honest, is a little frightening. Take, for example, what just happened in the porn business - and how tech-geeks just created a brand new way to "play": Click here if you dare and think you can stomach it.]

Regards,

Bill Buppert
Founder, ZeroGov.com

P.S. Have something to say? Say it! Chris@lfb.org.

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Is the Internet making us stupid? Whenever a new major technology comes around, it's an obligatory question. Is it good for us or is it making us worse off? Throughout the centuries, Nicholas Carr explains in his book The Shallows, human thought has been shaped by "tools of the mind."

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I know I'm not the only Internet optimist but sometimes it feels that way.

A set of prominent, smart and thoughtful analysts of technology has adopted a fretful or pessimistic tone in recent books about the Net. Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet-and How to Stop It came out in April 2008. In August of that year Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today's User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values appeared. Its title tells you much about its content.

Jaron Lanier's anti-Web 2.0 manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, was published this past January. Nick Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains came out last month; it was based on an article he wrote for The Atlantic called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

And still to come is Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, which examines the Net's impact on adolescents-how they interact with family and friends, learn to think and form their identities. I heard Turkle talk about the book a while back; a pretty representative quote from her (from a Frontline interview) is, "Do we want children to have social skills, to be able to just look at each other face to face and negotiate and have a conversation and be comfortable in groups? ... Well, if so, a little less Net time, s'il vous plait."

Most of these authors state that there is much that is good and beneficial about the Net. But their books heavily emphasize what's bad and/or worrisome about it. A person who woke up today after a 20-year nap and set about educating herself on the unfamiliar "World Wide Web" by reading these books would probably start panicking and wondering why it hadn't yet been shut down. They read like amicus briefs filed in a lawsuit against modern technology.

So as a counter to these books and the cumulative impression they leave, I'm going to do something that's frowned upon in many bien-pensant circles: I'm going to cheerlead for technology. Let's look at where we are at present:

-In developed economies that are free of totalitarianism, it is economically feasible and technically trivial for most people to express themselves, as much as they like, in any form or media that can be digitally transmitted-words, music, pictures, video, code, etc. Whatever they create can be made available, almost instantly and freely, around the world, to everyone else in a similar society.

-It's easy for these people to instantly access a huge amount of free information on almost any topic imaginable and to sort through this information with some level of precision.

-It's also easy for them to find old friends and colleagues and meet new ones, connect with these people and stay in contact with them over time, even as their circumstances change.

-Huge numbers of the planet's poorest people have finally ended the information and communication vacuum that has hampered their progress and increased misery. There are over mobile-phone subscriptions in the world today. One of the globalization pundit's favorite lines used to be that over half of the world's population had never placed a phone call. Anyone think that's still the case?

-The Web's novel technologies and approaches are changing the world of work, making organizations more multivoiced and egalitarian.

-Intense, Schumpeterian competition in the tech sector is yielding unprecedented levels of innovation in devices, applications and services. And much of this innovation is concerned with making tools that are powerful, yet easy and fun to use. Technology is now expected to delight us, not frustrate us.

None of this was the case 20 years ago-not even close. And isn't all of it really good news, on balance? Turkle says: "I see part of my role in this conversation as giving nostalgia a good name." Well, I see part of my role here as restoring progress' good name, making it once again something to celebrate rather than disparage.

Carr and Turkle are particularly worried about the bad habits that result from "always on, always on you" technologies. And I see their point; there certainly seem to be more ways for me to distract myself now. But the neuroscientist Steven Pinker got it exactly right in a great New York Times opinion piece: "... distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life."

Pinker courageously outs himself as a techno-enthusiast. "Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias," he wrote.

"Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart."

I'm an enthusiast, too. I'm not a techno-utopian, believing that technology alone will solve all our problems, or that it's an unalloyed good. But when I see the benefits information technology has brought us over the past 20 years, I get deeply appreciative and enthusiastic, and I remain so after I read some books that have come out recently.

A while back I quoted a prediction from Julian Simon: "The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely." Here's a technology-specific variant on it; let's call it McAfee's Elaboration: "Information and communication technologies will, for the foreseeable future, contribute positively to the material, psychological and cognitive well-being of the great majority of people who use them, regardless of their age or circumstances." I wonder if Zittrain, Keen, Lanier, Carr and Turkle would agree with this statement?
Do you agree with McAfee's Elaboration? Am I overinflating the virtues of the current era of technological progress or being too naive about or dismissive of its discontents? Are the good things not as good as I'm portraying them, or the bad things worse? Or are you, like me and Pinker, a cheerleader for tech? Add your opinion in the Reader Comments section.
Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business. His book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges was published in November 2009 by Harvard Business Press. His website is andrewmcafee.org and his Twitter identity is .
See Also: Defending The iPad's Restrictions Yes, It Is About The Technology

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Why The Internet Is Not Making Us Stupid

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I know I'm not the only Internet optimist but sometimes it feels that way. A set of prominent, smart and thoughtful analysts of technology has adopted a fretful or pessimistic tone in recent books about the Net. Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet -and How to Stop It came out in April 2008.

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Right now, you're probably happy that you have the vast resources of the entire Internet at your fingertips. It's a feeling of power, isn't it? All that information, all that content, right there for you whenever you want it?

You probably shouldn't be feeling so good about it, says writer Nicholas Carr, who has just written an article for The Atlantic Monthly with the provocative title, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr says that while the Internet allows us to get lots of information very quickly, it also encourages us not to look at it very thoughtfully.

In fact, Carr argues, when we give in to the natural impulses to click and skim, rather than to read and think, the Internet may actually doing us a disservice: It shortens our attention spans and even inhibits our ability to read longer books and articles.

In fact, if Carr is correct, you may never even make it to the end of this article.

Carr says it's not just about people scanning and jumping around very quickly. He says that the Internet is actually beginning to change the way we think. "It makes it harder even when we're offline to read books, as skimming takes over and displaces our modes of reading," he says.

It's not just Google Carr is talking about, but rather the structure and nature of the whole Internet. But he says that Google is very much the dominant player, and it both governs and symbolizes the way information is structured. "The way we gather information is by jumping around," he says, "and that's governed not only by Google but by the whole economic structure of the Internet."

Just as the arrival of Gutenberg's printing press helped to make reading universal, in the process ushering in enormous social revolutions, Carr says the Internet is producing a revolution of its own that is once again changing how we structure everything. While much of the revolution is positive, Carr says, he thinks that we should be aware that there might be some casualties, including prolonged reading and time for contemplation.

Carr tries to find time for more of what he calls deep reading, but he says that many of his friends are also facing difficulties in fighting Internet-influenced attention deficit disorder. In the article, he quotes one friend of his who told him: "I can't read War and Peace anymore. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."

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Right now, you're probably happy that you have the vast resources of the entire Internet at your fingertips. It's a feeling of power, isn't it? All that information, all that content, right there for you whenever you want it?

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Nicholas Carr: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?--What would McLuhan say?

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Please watch the interview below with Nicolas Carr. He is discussion what happens to our brains now that the internet is taking over. Consider what McLuhan would say at different points in this interview. Click on 'Think' to answer some questions--keep track in your notebooks. Click on "Dig Deeper" for yet another perspective.

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What the Internet is doing to our brains

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial " brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."

I can feel it, too. 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.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets-reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances-literary types, most of them-many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."

Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking-perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter-a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche's friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. "Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom," the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his "'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper."

"You are right," Nietzsche replied, "our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche's prose "changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style."

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that's not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind "is very plastic." Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. "The brain," according to Olds, "has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions."

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our "intellectual technologies"-the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities-we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock "disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences." The "abstract framework of divided time" became "the point of reference for both action and thought."

The clock's methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments "remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality." In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating "like clockwork." Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating "like computers." But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain's plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that's what we're seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net's influence doesn't end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people's minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience's new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the "shortcuts" would give harried readers a quick "taste" of the day's news, sparing them the "less efficient" method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives-or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts-as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that's been written about the Net, there's been little consideration of how, exactly, it's reprogramming us. The Net's intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant's machinists. With the approval of Midvale's owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions-an "algorithm," we might say today-for how each worker should work. Midvale's employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory's productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor's tight industrial choreography-his "system," as he liked to call it-was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the "one best method" of work and thereby to effect "the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts." Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. "In the past the man has been first," he declared; "in the future the system must be first."

Taylor's system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor's ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the "one best method"-the perfect algorithm-to carry out every mental movement of what we've come to describe as "knowledge work."

Google's headquarters, in Mountain View, California-the Googleplex-is the Internet's high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is "a company that's founded around the science of measurement," and it is striving to "systematize everything" it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It seeks to develop "the perfect search engine," which it defines as something that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want." In Google's view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can "access" and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. "The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people-or smarter," Page said in a speech a few years back. "For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence." In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, "Certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off." Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is "really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale."

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt's words, "to solve problems that have never been solved before," and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn't Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we'd all "be better off" if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network's reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web-the more links we click and pages we view-the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link-the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I'm just a worrywart. Just as there's a tendency to glorify technological progress, there's a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue's characters, "cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful." And because they would be able to "receive a quantity of information without proper instruction," they would "be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant." They would be "filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom." Socrates wasn't wrong-the new technology did often have the effects he feared-but he was shortsighted. He couldn't foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg's printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men "less studious" and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, "Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient." But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn't the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content," we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what's at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality-a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available."

As we are drained of our "inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance," Foreman concluded, we risk turning into "'pancake people'-spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."

I'm haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut-"I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid"-and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL's outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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What the Internet is doing to our brains

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"Is the internet making us stupid?" I type. Press enter. Almost instantly, a raft of answers and articles on screen. It's an unsettling feeling that my first instinct - to Google my own stupidity - may be the root of my increasing daftness.

A recent study (you've probably forgotten it by now) suggests 90 per cent of us are suffering from digital amnesia. More than 70 per cent of people don't know their children's phone numbers by heart, and 49 per cent have not memorised their partner's number. While those of us who grew up in a landline-only world may also remember friends' home numbers from that era, we are unlikely to know their current mobiles, as our phones do the job. The Kaspersky Lab concludes we don't commit data to memory because of the "Google Effect" - we're safe in the knowledge that answers are just a click away, and are happy to treat the web like an extension to our own memory.

Dr Maria Wimber, lecturer at the University of Birmingham's School of Psychology, worked with the internet security firm on their research. She believes the internet simply changes the way we handle and store information, so the Google Effect "makes us good at remembering where to find a given bit of information, but not necessarily what the information was. It is likely to be true that we don't attempt to store information in our own memory to the same degree that we used to, because we know that the internet knows everything."

These findings echo Columbia University Professor Betsy Sparrow's research on the Google Effect on memory, which concluded, "Our brains rely on the internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found."

This even extends to photographs. A Fairfield University study in 2003 found that taking photos reduces our memories. Participants were asked to look around a museum, and those who took photos of each object remembered fewer objects and details about them than those who simply observed. Dr Wimber says: "One could speculate that this extends to personal memories, as constantly looking at the world through the lens of our smartphone camera may result in us trusting our smartphones to store our memories for us. This way, we pay less attention to life itself and become worse at remembering events from our own lives."

But is this making us more stupid? Anthropologist Dr Genevieve Bell, a vice-president at Intel and director of the company's Corporate Sensing and Insights Group, believes not. She says technology "helps us live smarter" as we're able to access answers. "Being able to create a well-formed question is an act of intelligence, as you quickly work out what information you want to extract and identify the app to help achieve this. To me, this suggests a level of engagement with the world that's not about dumbness." She gives the example of a new mother trying to work out whether their baby not sleeping is bad - and when to start worrying. "These are all questions that technology may be able to address quicker than calling your own parents," she says. "This isn't making consumers more dumb, instead it's helping them to think smarter."

She believes our biggest concern should be our mindset towards technology. "My suspicion is it isn't that the use of technology is making us dumber; instead it's a very human set of preoccupations and anxieties," she says. "Ultimately it's the anxiety about what technology means for us, what it means for our humanity, our bodies, our competency - and what it means to have new technologies in some ways threaten some of those things."

In contrast, Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember and The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us, believes we should be alarmed. "We're missing the real danger, that human memory is not the same as the memory in a computer: it's through remembering that we make connections with what we know, what we feel, and this gives rise to personal knowledge. If we're not forming rich connections in our own minds, we're not creating knowledge. Science tells us memory consolidation involves attentiveness: it's in this process that you form these connections."

He believes the combination of the Google Effect and the constant distraction of smartphones, constantly delivering information, is concerning. A Microsoft study found the average human attention span fell from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds today.

"There is a superficiality to a lot of our thinking," Carr says. "Not just the cognitive side, but also the emotional side. That not only reduces richness in one's own life and sense of self, but if we assume that rich, deep thinking is essential to society then it will have a detrimental effect on that over the long run. There will always be people who buck those trends, but I think it will have an effect of making ourselves and our culture a little shallow."

Carr believes our brains are not like hard drives, or refrigerators that can get overstuffed so there's no more room. In contrast, he says they expand: "It's not as if remembering and thinking are separate processes. The more things you remember, the more material you have to work on, the more interesting your thoughts are likely to be," he says.

Andrew Keen, author of The Internet is Not the Answer, says: "Everything now is accessible - though supposed facts on the internet are not very reliable. It gives huge power to the people who store our data." He believes the emphasis on the art of memory from civilisations such as ancient China has been lost. "Some people believe it creates mental discipline: the facts themselves less important than the discipline of remembering them. Minds are in some ways more flaccid - especially if we're dabbling in social media."

He believes the bigger issue is what it's freeing us up to do. He agrees with Carr that "technology is making us shallower thinkers, multi-tasking, unable to digest speeches, even songs, perpetually flicking". In response, he says what we need now is creativity and innovation. "We need to think eclectically and daringly," he says. "The big issue is how to teach creativity. We don't need to learn facts, to remember stuff is less important, so the nature of professions are shifting; teachers should bear this is mind. The question is, how do you teach children to think differently?"

Dr Wimber advises people to spend time offline to safeguard their memories. "We know from memory research that we only remember information we pay attention to," she says. "If we spend all our time online, or experiencing our lives through a smartphone camera lens, we might miss important experiences, and not commit them to long-term memory. Constantly looking up information online is not an effective way to create permanent memories. The best way to make information stick is to sometimes sit back, and mentally refresh what you learnt or experienced a minute, an hour or a day ago."

Reuse content

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Google Effect: is technology making us stupid?

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"Is the internet making us stupid?" I type. Press enter. Almost instantly, a raft of answers and articles on screen. It's an unsettling feeling that my first instinct - to Google my own stupidity - may be the root of my increasing daftness.

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The Internet Makes Us Stupid and Here's Why

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What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

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The hosts chat it up about the power of Google. Do we retain more information when we don't have to depend on technology? Find out what they have to say during this chat.