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Is interent use changing our brains? -Laya

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Is interent use changing our brains? -Laya

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The Unseen Consequences of Technology on Our Intelligence - Laya

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The Unseen Consequences of Technology on Our Intelligence - Laya

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In today's fast-paced, technology-driven world, it's hard to imagine life without our smartphones, laptops, and the internet. These technological advancements have undoubtedly transformed our lives, making information more accessible and communication more convenient. However, as society continues to embrace these innovations, there is growing concern about the impact they have on our intelligence and the very essence of our humanity. In this article, we will explore various aspects of how technology might be affecting our intelligence and discuss what can be done to mitigate these effects.

The Decline in Human Intelligence: Is Technology to Blame?

Renowned linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky once said, "Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality." While technology has undoubtedly contributed to humanity's collective knowledge, there is mounting evidence that suggests our heavy reliance on it might be having detrimental effects on our intelligence.

According to several studies, the average human's intelligence quotient (IQ) has been steadily declining since the late 20th century. Experts attribute this decline to various factors, one of which is the widespread use of technology. As technology increasingly takes over tasks that once required human effort and cognitive abilities, our brains are left with fewer opportunities to develop and strengthen essential skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and memory.

The "Google Effect" on Our Memory and Cognitive Abilities

A decade ago, author Nicholas Carr posed a provocative question in his article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" He argued that the internet and search engines like Google have fundamentally changed the way we consume and process information, leading to a decline in our ability to think deeply and critically.

In his book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," Carr further explores how the internet's fragmented and hyperlinked nature makes it difficult for us to concentrate and engage in deep thinking. As a result, our minds become more superficial, relying on quick, shallow information rather than engaging in critical analysis and reflection.

This phenomenon, known as the "Google effect," has been supported by various studies that demonstrate how our brains offload information to the internet, resulting in a weakened ability to remember and process information. As Bill Gates once said, "The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow." However, this town square might be contributing to a decline in our cognitive abilities.

The Impact of Social Media on Our Attention Span and Emotional Intelligence

With the explosion of social media platforms in recent years, our online behaviour has changed significantly. These platforms are designed to capture and hold our attention, often at the expense of deep thinking and meaningful engagement with the content.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson points out that social media platforms encourage superficial thinking and emotional reactions rather than rational, critical analysis. This constant bombardment of information and stimuli can lead to a shortened attention span and an inability to concentrate on complex tasks.

Moreover, the rise of social media has also affected our emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. As we become more reliant on virtual connections, our ability to engage in face-to-face interactions and develop empathy and understanding can be diminished.

Our Evolving Relationship with Technology: The Good and the Bad

While it's clear that technology has its drawbacks, it's essential not to overlook the positive aspects and the potential for technology to enhance our cognitive abilities.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow," discusses how technology can improve our lives and augment our intelligence. He highlights the potential for artificial intelligence and machine learning to complement human decision-making and problem-solving.

However, Harari also warns of the dangers of becoming overly reliant on technology and losing our sense of self and individual control. Balancing the benefits of technology with the need to maintain our cognitive abilities and humanity is a challenge that society must confront.

Embracing Technology and Strengthening Our Cognitive Abilities

Though technology has undoubtedly had a significant impact on our intelligence, it is essential not to view it as solely responsible for the decline in human intelligence. Instead, we should strive to use technology as a tool that can enhance our cognitive abilities, rather than allowing it to hinder them.

To achieve this, we need to focus on developing and maintaining essential skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and memory. Incorporating activities and exercises that promote these skills into our daily routines can help counteract the negative effects of technology on our intelligence.

For example, engaging in activities that require deep concentration and focus, such as reading a book or practicing mindfulness meditation, can help improve our attention span and cognitive abilities.

Encouraging Digital Detoxes and Mindful Technology Use

In addition to strengthening our cognitive abilities, it's crucial to be mindful of our technology use and take breaks from our devices r

Regular digital detoxes are a great way to establish healthy and balanced technology use. Creating habits such as setting aside a certain amount of time each day without using devices or establishing uninterrupted periods of family time without screens can help reduce our reliance on technology and promote more engaging dialogueegularly. Digital detoxes, or periods of time spent away from screens and digital devices, can provide much-needed respite for our minds and help us reconnect with our surroundings and the people around us.

By being more intentional with our technology use and prioritizing activities that foster deep thinking and human connection, we can maintain a healthy balance between embracing technology and preserving our intelligence and humanity.

The Role of Education in Navigating the Digital Age

As technology continues to evolve and become an integral part of our lives, educational institutions must adapt and incorporate technology into their curriculums. However, this should not be limited to teaching students how to use technology but also how to use it intelligently and responsibly.

Educators must emphasize the importance of developing and maintaining essential cognitive skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and memory. By incorporating activities and exercises that promote these skills into the classroom, students can learn to use technology as a tool to enhance their intelligence rather than allowing it to diminish their cognitive abilities.

Furthermore, educational institutions must also address the social and emotional impacts of technology on students. Teaching empathy, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence is just as crucial as developing cognitive abilities in the digital age.

The Future of Humanity in a Technology-Driven World

As technology continues to advance, it's essential that we, as a society, remain vigilant about the potential consequences on our intelligence and humanity. We must strive to strike a balance between embracing the benefits of technology and preserving our cognitive abilities and human connections.

As Noam Chomsky once said, "Technology is a double-edged sword. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other." Recognizing the potential pitfalls of technology and taking proactive measures to mitigate them is crucial for maintaining our intelligence and humanity in the digital age.

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Humanity: The Unseen Consequences of Technology on Our Intelligence

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In today's fast-paced, technology-driven world, it's hard to imagine life without our smartphones, laptops, and the internet. These technological advancements have undoubtedly transformed our lives, making information more accessible and communication more convenient.

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"Internet & Stupidity" Pros & Cons! - Miya

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"Internet & Stupidity" Pros & Cons! - Miya

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Internet & “Stupidity” - Pros & Cons - ProCon.org

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Proponents say the internet is reprogramming our brains. Opponents say technophobia fuels debates about the internet making us stupid.

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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.
​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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independent world of mathematically measurable sequences

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faculty of the university of michigan medical school

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What the Internet is doing to our brains

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 Brief History of the Internet - Smitha :)

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 Brief History of the Internet - Smitha :)

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Sharing Resources

The Internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers in the '60s were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.

Another catalyst in the formation of the Internet was the heating up of the Cold War. The Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred the U.S. Defense Department to consider ways information could still be disseminated even after a nuclear attack. This eventually led to the formation of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the network that ultimately evolved into what we now know as the Internet. ARPANET was a great success but membership was limited to certain academic and research organizations who had contracts with the Defense Department. In response to this, other networks were created to provide information sharing.

January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to "talk" to each other. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, hence the birth of the Internet. All networks could now be connected by a universal language.

The image above is a scale model of the UNIVAC I (the name stood for Universal Automatic Computer) which was delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. It weighed some 16,000 pounds, used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per second. It was the first American commercial computer, as well as the first computer designed for business use. (Business computers like the UNIVAC processed data more slowly than the IAS-type machines, but were designed for fast input and output.) The first few sales were to government agencies, the A.C. Nielsen Company, and the Prudential Insurance Company. The first UNIVAC for business applications was installed at the General Electric Appliance Division, to do payroll, in 1954. By 1957 Remington-Rand (which had purchased the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950) had sold forty-six machines.

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The Internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers in the '60s were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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(Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Americans tend to view the impact of the internet and other digital technologies on their own lives in largely positive ways, Pew Research Center surveys have shown over the years. A survey of U.S. adults conducted in January 2018 finds continuing evidence of this trend, with the vast majority of internet users (88%) saying the internet has, on balance, been a mostly good thing for them personally.

But even as they view the internet's personal impact in a positive light, Americans have grown somewhat more ambivalent about the impact of digital connectivity on society as a whole. A sizable majority of online adults (70%) continue to believe the internet has been a good thing for society. Yet the share of online adults saying this has declined by a modest but still significant 6 percentage points since early 2014, when the Center first asked the question. This is balanced by a corresponding increase (from 8% to 14%) in the share of online adults who say the internet's societal impact is a mix of good and bad. Meanwhile, the share saying the internet has been a mostly bad thing for society is largely unchanged over that time: 15% said this in 2014, and 14% say so today.

This shift in opinion regarding the ultimate social impact of the internet is particularly stark among older Americans, despite the fact that older adults have been especially rapid adopters of consumer technologies such as social media and smartphones in recent years. Today 64% of online adults ages 65 and older say the internet has been a mostly good thing for society. That represents a 14-point decline from the 78% who said this in 2014. The attitudes of younger adults have remained more consistent over that time: 74% of internet users ages 18 to 29 say the internet has been mostly good for society, comparable to the 79% who said so in 2014.

As was true in our 2014 survey, college graduates are more likely than those with lower levels of educational attainment to say the internet has had a positive impact on society (and less likely to say it has had a negative impact). Among online adults with a college degree, 81% say the impact of the internet on society has been mostly good and just 7% say it has been mostly bad. By contrast, 65% of those with a high school diploma or less say the internet has had a mostly good impact on society, and 17% say its impact has been mostly bad.

Positive views of the internet are often tied to information access and connecting with others; negative views are based on a wider range of issues

Those who think the internet has had a good impact on society tended to focus on two key issues, according to follow-up items which allowed respondents to explain their views in their own words. Most (62% of those with a positive view) mentioned how the internet makes information much easier and faster to access. Meanwhile, 23% of this group mentioned the ability to connect with other people, or the ways in which the internet helps them keep more closely in touch with friends and family.

By contrast, those who think the internet is a bad thing for society gave a wider range of reasons for their opinions, with no single issue standing out. The most common theme (mentioned by 25% of these respondents) was that the internet isolates people from each other or encourages them to spend too much time with their devices. These responses also included references to the spread and prevalence of fake news or other types of false information: 16% mentioned this issue. Some 14% of those who think the internet's impact is negative cited specific concerns about its effect on children, while 13% argued that it encourages illegal activity. A small share (5%) expressed privacy concerns or worries about sensitive personal information being available online.

One-in-five Americans are now 'smartphone only' internet users at home

These attitudinal changes are occurring in a broader landscape in which the access options available to ordinary Americans are shifting dramatically. Most notably, fully one-in-five Americans (20%) are now "smartphone only" internet users at home - that is, they own a smartphone but do not subscribe to traditional broadband service where they live. This represents a 7-point increase compared with data from 2015, when 13% of Americans were smartphone-only users. Roughly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say they subscribe to traditional broadband service at home, similar to the 67% who said this in July 2015.

As has consistently been true in past surveys conducted by the Center, those who rely on their smartphones for home internet service are disproportionately less likely to have attended college compared with those with traditional broadband service. They also report living in lower-income households. For instance, 31% of Americans with an annual household income of less than $30,000 are smartphone-only internet users, more than three times the share among those living in households earning $75,000 or more per year (9%). This phenomenon is also notably more prevalent among blacks and Hispanics than among whites.

Conversely, relatively well-educated and financially well-off Americans are substantially more likely to say they do have a traditional broadband connection at home. Nearly nine-in-ten Americans in households earning $75,000 or more per year say they subscribe to home broadband service, nearly double the rate among those earning less than $30,000 per year (45% of whom have broadband service at home).

Beyond this growing reliance on smartphones for home internet service in lieu of traditional broadband service, it is also notable that 15% of Americans indicate that they have neither broadband service at home nor a smartphone. A large share of this group is not online at all: 11% of Americans indicate that they do not use the internet or email from any location. In other cases, the share without home broadband or a smartphone represents Americans who go online using other means.

And as was the case with smartphone-only internet usage, those who lack both broadband service and a smartphone are disproportionately likely to be from certain segments of the population. Most notably, 40% of Americans ages 65 and older fall into this category. But this is also true for substantial minorities of rural residents (25%), those who have not attended college (25%) and those from households earning less than $30,000 per year (23%).

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Declining Majority of Online Adults Say the Internet Has Been Good for Society

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At the same time, the contours of connectivity are shifting: One-in-five Americans (20%) are now 'smartphone only' internet users at home.

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Is the Internet making us stupid? -Raania

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Is the Internet making us stupid? -Raania

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While I was staring at my bookshelves, I realized I couldn't remember much about my books. I knew their titles, the looks of their cover pages, a few facts about them and maybe the name of their author. But for the most part, I had forgotten everything.

In a rush, I pulled out an article from one of my binders full of research papers to see if I could remember anything about it, but I had no luck. How I felt at the time was bad enough to give any graduate student an anxiety attack. Fortunately, while re-reading the paper, I had a strange sense of already knowing its content. The information was slowly coming back to me.

The curse of reading and forgetting

Like every paranoid person, I jumped on the know-it-all Google, to diagnose myself. Apparently, I had the "curse of reading and forgetting." While reading a piece, everything seems to be memorized as you go through it. Yet, a few days later, if you try to remember what the piece was about, you would probably fail.

Neuropsychologists use the concept of the forgetting curve to describe how fast we tend to forget things. This curve is steepest during the first 24 hours following a learning experience.

Presumably, memory has always been like this. To learn something such as a concept or a fact, information is first stored in what is called the working memory. This information is then consolidated into long-term memory which will stick for days or even years. To succeed, this process requires spaced, repeated learning of the information to be stored and proper sleep. I discuss this in my Sleep or Fail blog post.

Unfortunately, I believe our aptitude to recall memories has worsened since the appearance of the internet. Our brain doesn't value the ability to spontaneously pull out information anymore. Why would it anyway, when there's the know-it-all Google to provide you with the answers you need?

Why is this happening?

It is happening because our way of consuming information has changed since the pre-internet era. Today, most of the data we consume comes from the net and not from print - 2.5 quintillions (one followed by 18 zeros) bytes of data is created every day. And this number is growing exponentially.

To put this into perspective, 2.5 quintillion bytes is the same as 2.5 million hard drives each filled with one terabyte of data. One terabyte can hold roughly 50 million articles of the size of this blog post. Needless to say, 2.5 quintillion bytes is a lot of information.

Not only that but it has been shown that people are consuming three times as much information each day as they did before the internet. Being exposed to such extensive amounts of fast-flowing information requires us to be efficient in how we store it. And so, the brain has changed its workings.

The rapid flow of data generates a high turnover rate for information that's stored in our working memory. This turnover rate prevents any consolidation of happening. In other words, we are never keeping information long enough in our attention to form a rich connection in the brain.

To respond to that, the brain is using the internet as transactive memory, which serves the role of an external storage unit. With this new feature, the brain must only remember where to find the information because it doesn't have to store it anymore.

The good news is that we are not losing our minds. We are just adapting to a different way of consuming and processing information. That's probably why I couldn't remember most of my books. My brain knew that I could access them at any time, so why remember their content?

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Is the internet making us stupid? - Concordia University

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It's definitely rewiring our brain to remember less.

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The Internet's Impact On Education: Transforming Learning In The Digital Age - Smitha

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The Internet's Impact On Education: Transforming Learning In The Digital Age - Smitha

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The Internet's Impact On Education: Transforming Learning In The Digital Age

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Discover how the internet has revolutionized education and transformed learning in the digital age. Read all about it here.

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The Internet Makes Us Stupid and Here’s Why - Miya

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The Internet Makes Us Stupid and Here’s Why - Miya

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I hate to admit it. But reading this column will make you stupider. No, it's not that what I have to say is particularly obtuse. It's that you're reading this piece online, where you are presented a dizzying amount of options: click here, watch this, share that. These may seem like trivial decisions, but as the amount of online content explodes, our brains have consequently learned how to read differently (with constant distractions), which has reshaped how we learn. While the Internet gives us access to more information than before, paradoxically, we are becoming dimmer and more superficial as a people.

In the book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Nicholas Carr makes the case that technology is inducing an intellectual decay in our brains. It's a provocative and even counterintuitive claim but one that he backs up with ample findings from neuroscience.

In one UCLA study conducted in 2008, the brains of 24 people were scanned while they conducted Google searches. The researchers found that those who had more experience with Google had heightened activity in more parts of the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex. This is the part of your brain that is the seat of consciousness, which you use to make decisions. You might think this is beneficial: "The good news here is that Web surfing, because it engages so many brain functions, may help keep older people's minds sharp," Carr writes.

But there is a downside. When you encounter hyperlinked text, your brain asks the question: "To click or not to click." Because you are constantly being interrupted to make these decisions, you rarely "get lost" in the text and consequently the information infrequently becomes deep knowledge. Or as Carr puts it, "The redirection of our mental resources, from reading words to making judgments, may be imperceptible - our brains are quick - but it's been shown to impede comprehension and retention, particularly when repeated frequently." Not surprisingly, Internet usage rewires our brain. As part of the UCLA study, those with little Googling experience were instructed to use the Internet for one hour per day. After five days, their brains were rescanned, and sure enough, there was heightened activity in the prefrontal cortexes. Even a little Internet usage changes the neural pathways of your brain.

When you read a book, you comprehend more. According to a study in the Journal of Digital Information, those who read documents with hypertext didn't retain as much information as those who read text without links. Indeed, book reading is under stimulating. That is a good thing because your brain can transfer this information from your "working memory" to "long-term memory." Neuroscientists have discovered that long-term memory isn't just where you store random facts, but "schemas" that help you organize thoughts and concepts. But there is only so much you can transfer into your long-term memory at once, what scientists call the "cognitive load."

When you read a book, you take a thimble of information from your working memory and fill your bathtub of long-term memory, to use Carr's thought experiment. Yet when you read on the Internet, "What we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source," he writes. Our brains don't assimilate the information in a rich and meaningful way, creating fewer connections between our other memories. Carr puts it bluntly: "We become mindless consumers of data."

The Internet has indeed changed how we read and think. But does that really matter? You can just Google for facts and figures. But the richness of human intelligence is predicated on summoning our long-term memory. Creativity requires engaging our long-term faculties, in order to create new neural pathways and associations. By reading incessantly on the Internet, we scatter our minds, lessen our focus, and diminish our aptitude.

Kabir Sehgal is author of Coined: The Rich Life of Money And How It's History Has Shaped Us. He is a former vice president at J.P. Morgan and Grammy-winning producer.

Learn more about all things crypto with short, easy-to-read lesson cards. Click here for Fortune's Crypto Crash Course.

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The Internet Makes Us Stupid and Here's Why

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A Deep Dive Into The Shrinking Attention Span- Izzy

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A Deep Dive Into The Shrinking Attention Span- Izzy

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Exploring The Negative Consequences Of Technology In Attention Span

According to a study conducted by Microsoft Canada, humans have a shorter attention span than goldfish. In the contemporary world, every person is somehow associated with technology, mostly with a smartphone. Smartphones have become a necessity that lies at the top of the survival pyramid. You would never see a person on the bus stand or at a railway station just patiently waiting for their ride. Instead, they would be on their phone, talking or scrolling. This feels normal, expected even; the time when people would initiate a conversation with strangers, exchanging bits of kindness, is long forgotten. This leads to the seclusion of one from their own society. Gradually, we are slipping away from reality; we find ourselves cooped in a corner in a room full of people.

How Is Shrinking Our Attention Span?

A study by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine reveals that people with higher usage of social media and technology feel socially isolated. Another study by Dr. Jean Twenge in 2020 suggests that there is an increase in depression, self-harm, and suicide cases among American young adults due to the increase in technology use. Constant usage of social media for short periods of time, like waiting in a queue at the grocery market, makes us completely dependent, thus shortening our attention span.

Social media is not the only aspect of technology. Technology enables people to multitask. You can do various things at once, just by sitting or standing in one place. Multiple people can edit a document from the comfort of their homes on different continents. This, however, as advantageous as it is, also decreases our attention span. Throughout the day, a person is exposed to an overload of information, whether it's news or work-related information. The constant pings of notifications distract a person from whatever they're doing, decreasing their focus. In fact, this is such a common phenomenon that people practice a social media or technology detox to boost their focus. This involves not using any applications or social media for a certain period of time.

The constant usage of mobile devices has also introduced a syndrome in the periphery of vision, known as the phantom vibration syndrome. As the name suggests, people hallucinate that their phones are ringing or vibrating even when they're not. This happens due to misinterpretations by the brain and the short attention span, which makes us check our mobile phones every now and then, causing severe anxiety or stress.

The study led by Microsoft Canada on how technology has affected attention span found that since the year 2000, the average attention span of a person dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. The study was conducted among 2000 Canadian young adults, wherein their brain activity was studied with the help of electroencephalograms. The year 2000 marks the widespread adoption of mobile phones, a device capable of receiving, sending, and connecting people instantly across oceans.

Benefits Of Technology

We cannot, however, ignore the advancements made in every sector because of technology. The COVID-19 pandemic is being tackled mainly by using technology, with the availability of educational video conferencing and remote work. Additionally, technology also offers multitasking capabilities, which can be both advantageous and disadvantageous. On one hand, it allows people to perform multiple tasks at once, but on the other hand, it can lead to information overload and decreased focus due to constant distractions.

Conclusion

The impact of technology on human attention span and well-being is a topic that deserves further exploration and attention. It is important to find a balance between utilizing technology for its benefits and avoiding its negative consequences. Technology was created as an aid to humans, and instead, it has become a necessity. The constant notifications, the information overload, the irrelevance of the data presented, and targeted advertisements, all play a role in our shrinking attention span.

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A Deep Dive Into The Shrinking Attention Span

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Has technology shortened our attention spans? Which are the elements that make us lose our focus and what can we do about it?

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14 Way the Internet Improves Lives - Smitha :)

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14 Way the Internet Improves Lives - Smitha :)

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The internet is a near ubiquitous aspect of modern life - making it easy to take for granted all the skills, tools, opportunities, and benefits that it

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Is the Internet Making Us Stupid? Sayyeda ❤️

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Is the Internet Making Us Stupid? Sayyeda ❤️

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In an Atlantic Monthly article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” writer Nicholas Carr says the Internet is changing the way we read, shortening our attention spans and even altering the way our minds work.

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The internet isn’t making us stupid. It’s making us humble. Sayyeda ❤️

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The internet isn’t making us stupid. It’s making us humble. Sayyeda ❤️

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You are sitting across from a friend who asks if you know the capital of Canada. How does your willingness to answer this question change if you have access to the Internet (e.g., via the smartphone in your pocket) or not (e.g., you are hiking in the wilderness with no Internet access)?

That's the question psychologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo pondered in a paper published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

In a series of experiments, they asked participants trivia questions ranging in difficulty from, "What is the name of a dried grape?" to, "Who was the first ruler of the Holy Roman Empire?" Before participants got the chance to respond, they were asked simply, "Do you know the answer to this question?"

When participants had access to the internet, they were less likely to say, "I know the answer." The mere presence of a search engine made them less confident in their own brains.

It's a good illustration of just how fundamentally the internet has changed how we interact with our own minds.

Is the internet really making us dumber?

Knowledge has always been distributed across members of our communities. No one individual can know everything, and we often "offload" some knowledge onto others. It's okay that I don't know how to fix a leaky faucet, because I can call Mark.

The internet, psychologists theorize, is the equivalent of a giant, all-knowing Mark. It doesn't just know how to fix leaky faucets. It knows everything. With our smartphones by our sides at all times, we can offload our responsibility to understand the world to the internet. And the more we offload our intelligence to the internet, the less of it we need to store in our brains. Psychologists have seen this in the lab. People are less willing to remember information when they believe it's saved in a computer.

And as this newest study by Canadian psychologists suggests, we seem to become less sure of our own brains when internet access is nearby.

One possibility is that the internet actually makes us more humble."We suggested that people might be engaging in a sort of social comparison between themselves and the internet," Amanda Ferguson, one of the study's authors, writes me in an email. "This would reduce their 'feeling-of-knowing' the answer (since they're comparing themselves to the all-knowing internet), and ultimately lead them to answer fewer questions."

Alternatively, the internet raises the stakes for us to be correct. When a friend asks if you know the capital of Canada, you'd feel more responsible for the accuracy of the information if you had a smartphone in your hands. It ups the costs of being wrong. So it's better not to answer.

Whether this is good or bad depends on context. But here's an optimistic takeaway: It's not so bad for us to be reminded there's an impossibly large amount of information in the world, to take a step back and be humbled and in awe of it.

In the study, when participants with internet access did give answers based on their own knowledge, they were more likely to be correct. The internet highlights what we don't know, but makes us more accurate when we feel like we do.

And the internet isn't a flawless catalog of information, either: "Even when people were using the internet to search for answers in our study, their accuracy was only at around 83 percent," Ferguson says. "So our external knowledge store - i.e., the internet - seems to have a few flaws of its own. "
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The internet isn't making us stupid. It's making us humble.

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The internet makes us less confident in our brains - and that's not a bad thing.

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Is the Internet Making us Stupid? (Nicholas Carr). -Raania

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Is the Internet Making us Stupid? (Nicholas Carr). -Raania

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Nicholas Carr: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

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How does the internet effect brain function?-Makayla

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How does the internet effect brain function?-Makayla

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Recent research suggests that excess use of the internet over prolonged periods of time may negatively affect some cognitive functions, particularly attention and short-term memory.

Since using the internet often involves our ability to multi-task between different settings-and somehow trains our brains to quickly shift focus to the stream of pop-ups, prompts, and notifications-this may, in fact, interfere with our ability to maintain focus on a particular cognitive task for extended times.

In other words, our ability to perform our daily activities involves a combination between our ability to multi-task and shift attention between different tasks, and our ability to maintain attention on a particular topic.

While digital multi-tasking may be a good practice for shifting focus, it may also weaken our ability to maintain focus on one area for an extended period of time. So it may make us more easily distractible because it reduces our ability to ignore distractions.

In addition to its negative effects on cognition, excess internet use has been associated with a higher risk for depression and anxiety, and can make us feel isolated and/or overwhelmed.

How can we lessen these negative impacts our brains?

There aren't any clinical guidelines that clearly describe what may constitute "acceptable" vs. "excess" use of the internet, as this is a new area in research that remains under-investigated. However, I suggest trying to:

Limit the time you spend on the internet. During your working and non-working hours, schedule specific times to use the internet (unless your job directly involves use of the internet or you have an important deadline.)

Set aside a certain time of the day when you check your email inbox. After work, schedule your internet time at home so that you can spend more time with your family and friends. While I was in the habit of having my email open throughout the time I was in the office, I've learned to only check it at scheduled times of the day so that I can focus on other things that also need my attention.

Make sure your use of the internet isn't taking time away from your family. Perhaps time you're spending scrolling through websites, social media and email could be better spent in other healthy endeavors, such as physical activity, socializing or reading a book. These are all activities that are important for your brain health.

How can we avoid email overload?

As you consider how you'd like to embark on a "digital detox," don't forget about the dreaded "email overload." While email is an essential work tool that we simply can't avoid, there are certain things we can do to help deal with this problem:

Acknowledge the fact that not every email has to be addressed immediately. While some issues are urgent, others may be less urgent. Try to "triage" your inbox so that important and urgent messages are addressed right away, and others can be addressed later, according to their urgency.

"Snooze" your sent messages so that they're delivered at specific times. That way, you can ensure your coworkers get the non-urgent email you typed late at night or over the weekend during their work hours.

Disable unnecessary notifications. It can be very distracting to be alerted each and every time an email arrives in your inbox.

Unsubscribe from any unnecessary newsletters that you no longer need. This will help reduce the "clutter" in your inbox and allow to focus on other things that matter.

Avoid discussing major issues or topics by email unless absolutely necessary. Some issues are better handled in face-to-face meetings.

Who is the most at risk and why?

Excess internet use, and even "internet addiction," is a common and probably under-diagnosed condition which affects people across different levels of educations, employment and socioeconomic status. While we may be prone to think this is more common in young unemployed teenagers, studies suggest that highly educated and employed young to middle-aged adults in highly demanding professions represent a major portion of affected people.

Why is this digital overexposure potentially dangerous?

If left untreated, this digital overexposure can have negative effects on our social life and our cognitive and mental health. It can isolate us from our family and friends, increase risk for "burn-out," and take away from the time we have for other meaningful and enjoyable things in life.

With increased awareness, we'll become better at recognizing and treating it in the early stages. The internet is a double-edged sword. When used reasonably, it can increase our productivity and keep us connected. However, in excess, it can make us less happy and less efficient.
Rawan Tarawneh is a neurologist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

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How does the internet affect brain function?

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Since using the internet often involves our ability to multi-task between different settings and multiple open tabs, this may, in fact, interfere with our ability to maintain focus on a particular cognitive task for extended times.

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Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. Sayyeda ❤️

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Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. Sayyeda ❤️

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Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. (Published 2008)

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Over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

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The Internet Makes You Think You’re Smarter Than You Are-Izzy

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The Internet Makes You Think You’re Smarter Than You Are-Izzy

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The research: Yale doctoral candidate Matthew Fisher and his colleagues Mariel Goddu and Frank Keil asked people a series of questions that seemed answerable but were actually difficult. The questions concerned things people assume they know but actually don't-such as why there are phases of the moon and how glass is made. Some people were allowed to look up the answers on the internet, while others were not. Then the researchers asked a second set of questions on unrelated topics. In comparison with the other subjects, the people who'd been allowed to do online searches vastly overestimated their ability to answer the new questions correctly.

A version of this article appeared in the July-August 2015 issue (pp.26-27) of Harvard Business Review.

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The Internet Makes You Think You're Smarter Than You Are: An Interview with Matthew Fisher

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Is the ability to look things up online inflating our sense of intelligence?

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The Internet is the backbone of today's world.

It powers education and economy. It supports our health and well-being. And it connects us to our neighbors and to those we love. Americans without Internet miss out on many of these benefits. Roughly 1 in 5 American households aren't connected to the Internet. That's a fifth of our country that's unable to fully participate in modern life.

Access to the Internet isn't a luxury. It's a necessity. That's why the Biden-Harris administration is providing $65 billion to expand Internet access. We want to make sure that everyone in America has access to reliable and affordable high-speed Internet. High-speed Internet doesn't just help individuals. It helps our country. It saves us time and money. It creates jobs and opportunities here in the United States. And it helps us connect to one another, building a stronger, more free society.

These are some of the ways that high-speed Internet has transformed our world:

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It powers education and economy. It supports our health and well-being. And it connects us to our neighbors and to those we love. Americans without Internet miss out on many of these benefits. Roughly 1 in 5 American households aren't connected to the Internet.

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Is the Internet Making You Stupid? -Raania

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Is the Internet Making You Stupid? -Raania

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Why the Internet is making us Dumber. -Raania

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Why the Internet is making us Dumber. -Raania

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Few inventions have revolutionised the world quite as much as the internet.

Providing almost unlimited knowledge at the click of a button, the internet has transformed the way we live and the way society functions.

A couple of decades ago, specialised knowledge was held only by a select few. Now we can learn pretty much anything by typing a few words into Google.
But is the human race actually any smarter as a result?
Given that we now have access to information on tap, the answer should be a definite yes.

But there's mounting evidence to suggest the opposite may be true.

Is the internet making us stupider, and if so, why?

Welcome to the 'Post Truth' Age

Whenever Donald Trump utters the words "FAKE NEWS", it's easy to roll one's eyes and marvel at how far one man can descend into self-parody.

But the issue of manufactured news and 'alternative facts' is a relevant one.
The internet doesn't only offer us unprecedented access to information. It gives us unprecedented ability to share information. Anyone can now publish anything online and pass it off as truth.
The democratisation of information sharing has come with many benefits. Before we had to accept whatever government officials and 'experts' were telling us. We had to assume that whatever agenda they might have wouldn't get in the way of honest facts.

The ability to question the official narrative is a key component of democracy. The internet has been a wonderful tool for this.

But what has happened in recent years is the emergence of the so-called 'post-truth age'.

We now have competing narratives presenting different versions of the 'truth'.

From falsely attributed quotes on Instagram to websites dedicated to 'proving' that the Earth is flat and countless other conspiracy theories, it's become clear that we can't believe anything we read online.

Even reputable media sources are increasingly reporting manufactured stories without first investigating the facts.
What does truth even mean anymore?
How do we tell what's real from the lies, misinformation and inaccuracies bombarding us online?

This is especially tricky because part of the problem is the human mind.

Why the Human Mind is Wired for Ignorance

In his book "The Death of Expertise", Thomas Nichols highlights one of the biggest obstacles to true knowledge.

It's called confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is simple. We only tend to seek out information that already fits in with our existing viewpoint.
The human mind is very conservative. To a large extent, our mind isn't wired to seek knowledge. It's designed to strengthen our pre-existing belief systems.

In some ways, this is understandable.

If we were to question everything we think, we'd always be second-guessing ourselves. We wouldn't be particularly functional in daily life.

It takes a certain amount of energy and openness to question our thoughts, beliefs and assumptions. It requires courage, too, because no one likes to feel they're wrong about something.

Nichols talks about another tendency of the mind, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect maintains that the less skilled we are at a particular task, the less likely we are to be aware of our incompetence.

In other words, most of the time we are completely ignorant of the true extent of our ignorance.

We assume we know a lot more than we actually do. As a result, people with the least knowledge often tend to be most confident in their assertions.

Together, the Dunning-Kruger effect and confirmation bias make a lethal combination.

One might argue that in the 'age of information', there's little excuse for being ignorant. After all, we have Wikipedia!

The problem is the mind often doesn't want to learn. It doesn't want to have to challenge its assumptions and assertions. Rather, it wants to bolster them, and by doing so, bolster our sense of self and ego.
We want to be right.
Exposure to information which contradicts our beliefs creates a form of cognitive dissonance. The mind doesn't want to admit that its representation of reality is at odds with actual reality.

So, thanks to confirmation bias, we only tend to want information that confirms what we already believe.

The internet makes this all too easy.

In fact, many websites from Facebook to Google and Youtube have algorithms that filter the information we receive. They show us what they think we want to see.

By recording online searches, search engines create a 'filter bubble' that largely brings up information we already agree with.
Confirmation bias is therefore built into the internet.
If you add the Dunning-Kruger effect on top of that (ie, our inability to recognise our own ignorance), then you can see the problem.

The comments sections on many websites show this in full effect. People rarely agree on anything because everyone's already convinced they are right.

Furthermore, there's no opinion or belief, however outlandish or bizarre, that doesn't have a tribe of online proponents.

Think the Queen is a shape-shifting reptilian? Join the David Icke forum. Believe the Earth is flat? There are websites devoted to 'proving' that. Wonder if the moon is actually made of cheese? There's most likely a site for that too.

The internet can make the best (or worst) of us feel like experts on a subject. All we need is to find and share factoids on social media. But this is can be a pointless endeavour because our social media followers generally tend to have the same views as us. Those that don't and who challenge our ideas are often unfriended promptly.

On social media, we're rarely looking for reasoned discourse or to further our knowledge. We're looking for people to agree with and reinforce what we have already decided is true.

The psychology of internet trolling is worthy of its own post. Journalist Christian Schneider's rather grim assessment is:

"Rather than making the average American smarter, the Internet has instead allowed us to retreat back to our most base impulses. Whereas it once promised a high-minded world of boundless knowledge, interconnectivity has instead reinforced our flaws. We are now primarily roving packs of like-minded ideologues hell-bent on eviscerating dissent and demonstrating primacy within our own groups. (Who, when taking breaks, watch a lot of Netflix and porn.)"

The Battle For Your Mind

With so much material competing for our attention, it's getting harder for content providers to grab our attention. Think about it. With endless Facebook and Twitter feeds to occupy us, it can take a lot to make to click a headline.

The old saying "knowledge is power" no longer applies in the internet age. Knowledge is available to everyone. These days, power is the ability to catch and sustain someone's attention for more than a second.

To that end, content providers now have to play dirty.

That's where clickbait comes in.

Clickbait is a way of manipulating people by triggering an emotional response. Emotive words fire us up by expressing something extreme, whether positive or negative. Words such as "Shocking", "Outrageous", "Scandal," "Secret" and "You Won't Believe" are common in clickbait headlines.

Aside from emotional manipulation, clickbait plays on the brain's need to close the gap between what we know and what we want to know. That's why clickbait headlines trigger our curiosity with cliffhangers. An example might be:
"This woman got insulted in line at the supermarket. You won't BELIEVE what she did next..."
The problem is the content in question usually fails to match the hyperbole of the headline. We end up wasting our time on material of dubious quality and little value or relevance to anything.

Yet there's a battle going on to control our minds - to get us to click and consume.

Clickbait generally works. It taps into primal parts of the human brain, so it's most likely here to stay. With an increasing glut of information and pseudo-facts bombarding us, content providers have to work ever harder to grab our attention.

But, as psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic notes:

"Online stories are to intellectual curiosity what fast food is to hunger. Most of the stories we consume online are as valuable as daytime television."

The internet makes it easy to fill up. But are we consuming anything of value?

Bias, Bias, Everywhere

Things get worse when we consider that most media has a distinct political, social or ideological bias.

This is all too clear in the printed media. Newspapers are overt in their support of chosen political parties. As a result, the stories they run and their presentation adheres to a certain socio-political narrative.

The news isn't created only to inform. It's created to shape opinion and mould people's minds. We're not only told what's happening, we're told what to think about what's happening.

Sometimes this bias is blatant. Other times, it can be more subtle. But it's almost always there.
Again, the bias isn't only in the media - it's operating in us, too.
We filter the information we receive, whether consciously or not. We seek what interests us and what tallies with our existing worldview. Because the internet offers us so much choice of information, this is pretty easy to do.

Let's say I have Republican political viewpoint. It's unlikely I'm going to spend my time reading media outlets with Democrat leanings. Why? Because I already think my viewpoint is correct.

What happens if I encounter new information that conflicts with my belief system? Well, my mind will most likely ignore, distort or misapprehend that new information.

Again, Chamorro-Premuzic says:

"Who cares about how many knowledge sources we have, if we only consume a limited amount of information? Yes, the internet has exponentially increased the choice of alternatives, especially when it comes to sources of information, but we can only deal with this overwhelming range of choices by ignoring most of them."

One of the dangers of the internet age is we end up believing we're well-informed and objective when in actual fact, all we're doing is gravitating to material that reinforces our existing beliefs.

This doesn't make us smarter and it doesn't make us better informed. It only strengthens our ego-driven sense of self and reality.

Considering things from multiple viewpoints leads to better understanding and greater insight. It increases both creativity and empathy while reducing prejudice and narrow-thinking.

The internet provides us with the opportunity to expand our minds and become better more rounded human beings.

Many people don't use it that way, however.

With information freely accessible to all, it's believed we're now relying less on critical thinking and logic to find answers.

Instead, we key a few words into Google or Wikipedia and the thinking is already done for us.

The Internet is Changing Our Brains

Nicholas Carr is the author of "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains".

He points out that we are subject to a dizzying amount of online content and a plethora of distractions.

Bombarded with options to click this, like that, watch this, share that, it's becoming increasingly harder for us to absorb and retain information.

Our brains are being forced to learn how to process information differently.

Brain scans have confirmed that internet usage heightens activity in the prefrontal cortex. The internet is rewiring our brains, and it may not be for the better.

It takes attentiveness and focus to convert information into knowledge and memory.

If we're too busy figuring out where to click next and whether to like or share something, we have less mental bandwidth available to process information. As a result, our ability to read and comprehend becomes superficial and shallow.

Carr likens our brains to refrigerators. There's only so much they can store at one time. If we stuff it too full, there's no room left over.

He makes the sobering claim:

"Technology is making us shallow thinkers - multi-tasking, unable to digest speeches, even songs, perpetually flicking."

We become, as Carr says, "mindless consumers of data."

We often end up doing a number of different tasks at once, flicking through browser tabs or flitting between apps, catching up on emails, tweets or Facebook posts. We can even do this while walking down the street or watching television, or even while having a conversation with someone.

The problem with multitasking is it's actually a bit of an illusion. Neuroscientist Earl Miller, one of the world's experts on divided attention, explains that "when people think they're multitasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there's a cognitive cost in doing so."

Are We Dopamine Junkies?

Video games creators have spent decades learning to hack the brain to get us hooked on their product. We sit like monkeys in a lab pressing buttons to get a reward. The reward, in this case, is a dopamine hit each time we hit our target: to beat the bad guys and progress to the next level.

It would have been hard to get too hooked on the internet when it first came along.

In the days before broadband, it was a hassle even getting logged on. Even once you did, the connection was often slow and temperamental. It could take an age to load the simplest of pages. And then you always had your mum always complaining at you to get off the phone line.

It's a different story now. The internet is accessible pretty much anywhere, around the clock. All we need to do is reach into our pocket and take our phone.

It's little wonder that smartphone, internet and social media addiction has become a real and recognised problem.
Some scientists consider the internet a digital drug.
Brain scans show that continual use of smartphones, laptops and iPads affects the brain much the same way as cocaine does. Dr Peter Whybrow, director of neuroscience at UCLA, even calls digital screens "electronic cocaine".

Mandy Saligari, of Harley Street rehab clinic, warns people that giving a child a smartphone is like "giving them a gram of coke." She says, "why do we pay so much less attention to those things than we do to drugs and alcohol when they work on the same brain impulses?" Indeed, it's reported that children as young as 13 are now attending 'smartphone rehab'.

According to a former Google product manager, programmers are engaged in "brain hacking".
Our electronic devices are being engineered to be as addictive as possible.
A neuro-chemical carrot and stick mechanism keeps us addicted. Facebook and Twitter timelines use a continuous scroll because it's shown to keep us searching longer.

As we're scrolling, we receive rewards via a dopamine feedback loop each time we find a piece of information that interests us. Rewards also come when someone 'likes' or shares something we've posted on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

When the brain's prefrontal is cortex active, we're wired to seek external stimulation. It's also very novelty-driven, so our attention is easily diverted to new things. This makes it hard to focus as the brain gets distracted by constant bombardment of data.

According to neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin:

"We answer the phone, look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty- seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks."

Things get worse.

When we do put our phone down, the brain releases bursts of anxiety-generating cortisol and adrenaline. This might explain why people check their phones an average of every 15 minutes. The feeling we could be missing out on something generates noticeable anxiety.

The triggering of these stress hormones can overstimulate the brain. This results in mental fatigue and poor concentration.

The fact that, for many, internet usage has all the hallmarks of neurological addiction, is a worrying one. This is an addiction on a mass scale, the likes of which we've never before known. No one knows what the implications might be down the line.

How to Use Technology and Not be Used by it

The internet is one of the most paradigm shattering inventions in the history of mankind. It has the potential to bring out the best in people. It provides means to help us learn, grow and expand our knowledge and horizons. We can learn about other cultures and grow in understanding and empathy.

It remains the most powerful tool ever created for learning and sharing information. It's a means of communication, commerce and sharing art and entertainment. It provides a voice for groups otherwise marginalised by the mainstream.

It can also initiate change in the world. The role of social and digital media in the 'Arab Spring' is well documented.

Like anything in life, it's all a matter of how we use it.

Many people, afflicted by confirmation bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect, use it to entrench their already blinkered perspective. At the extreme end of the spectrum, these are the people who spend their free time trolling in comments sections and getting into flame wars with strangers.

Such people serve as a warning to us all. Use the technology foolishly and you'll never be more than a fool. Use it well and you have a source of real power at your fingertips.
1. Be aware of the potentially addictive nature of smartphones and digital devices.
Experts call them "digital crack" for a reason.

Whenever I find myself spending too much time online, I try to cut back my usage. It's all too easy to zone out while browsing mindless trash online.
But life isn't something to be lived behind a computer or phone screen. It's a participatory experience, not a virtual one.
It's easy to get pulled down the online rabbit hole. You might find an hour or more has passed while doing nothing but scrolling through newsfeeds, clicking shiny links or smiling at silly pictures of cats.

That's an hour of your life you'll never get back, so make sure there's nothing better you wouldn't rather be doing.

It's essential that we use technology rather than be used by it. Is the dog wagging the tail or is the tail wagging the dog?

As we've learned, product developers are deliberately trying to 'brain hack' us. There's a battle being waged for control of our minds. It's psychological warfare.

The only person who ought to be in control of your mind is YOU. It pays to keep that in mind and side-step any potential manipulation and tendency toward addiction.

Unplug every so often.

Forget social media.

Do stuff in the real world instead. Connect with people in person and fully engage in each moment. No one, absolutely no one, will ever get to the end of their life and wish they'd spent more time on Facebook.

Read the old-fashioned way.

Studies have shown that reading books is good for the brain. It aids focus and comprehension. Free from online distraction, the brain is receiving a continuous and coherent stream of information from a single source.

2. Learn to think critically.

Now that we're drowning in so much information, misinformation and blatant lies, critical thinking is a necessity. We can no longer rely on journalists to do the work for us. We have to learn to critically evaluate information for ourselves.

When reading any kind of content, it's essential to be aware of who wrote it and why. Does the website or media outlet have certain biases or agendas? If I was to go to an 'alt-right' website, for instance, it's a safe bet that what is reported and the way it is reported will be slanted toward far-right ideology.

The same story can be reported in hugely different ways depending on who is reporting it and the narrative they're attempting to convey. Even concrete facts can easily be distorted or misrepresented.

Often the most 'reliable' and mainstream outlets are operating from subtle agendas, mindsets or ideological assumptions. Always be aware of the agenda behind what you're reading. Very often things are reported in a way that encourages you to draw certain conclusions.

It's wise to get your news and information from multiple sources. Reporting is often sensationalist and black and white. There are always different sides to every story. Never unquestioningly believe anything until you've corroborated it as widely as possible.
Come to your own conclusions. That's your job. Don't let anyone else do it for you.
3. Recognise your cognitive biases.

Don't forget the mind is wired to reinforce what we already believe to be true. We seek out information that backs up our existing conclusions and assumptions.

By learning to recognise our cognitive biases, we can be open to new ways of thinking.

Why cling to our beliefs and viewpoints when they change all the time, anyway? When I was five, I believed in Santa Claus and tooth fairies. I don't now. A flexible, adaptive mindset is necessary in life. We should be open to learning all the time.

It pays to consider things from multiple perspectives. We don't have to agree with them, but trying to understand how others think gives us a great advantage. It helps us better navigate an ever-more complex world. It can lead to insight and creativity. It helps us become more intelligent and compassionate human beings.
The internet is the greatest tool ever created for learning.
If we can avoid the pitfalls listed above, it offers a portal to personal and planetary transformation. Free access to knowledge can help us create a more unified, intelligent, peaceful and cooperative world.

Let's take this gift and use this gift for the betterment of ourselves and the world around us.
Why the modern world is bad for your brain What is "brain hacking"? Tech insiders on why you should care It's 'digital heroin': How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies Giving your child a smartphone is like giving them a gram of cocaine, says top addiction expert

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Why the Internet is Making Us Dumber: The Dark Side of the Online Age

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The internet provides free access to just about everything known to man. Why then, is it having an adverse effect on the human brain?

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Declining Majority of Online Adults Say the Internet Has Been Good for Society.-Makayla

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Declining Majority of Online Adults Say the Internet Has Been Good for Society.-Makayla

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Declining Majority of Online Adults Say the Internet Has Been Good for Society

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At the same time, the contours of connectivity are shifting: One-in-five Americans (20%) are now ‘smartphone only’ internet users at home.

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The Internet isn't making you stupid. -Raania

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The Internet isn't making you stupid. -Raania

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You are sitting across from a friend who asks if you know the capital of Canada. How does your willingness to answer this question change if you have access to the Internet (e.g., via the smartphone in your pocket) or not (e.g., you are hiking in the wilderness with no Internet access)?

That's the question psychologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo pondered in a paper published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

In a series of experiments, they asked participants trivia questions ranging in difficulty from, "What is the name of a dried grape?" to, "Who was the first ruler of the Holy Roman Empire?" Before participants got the chance to respond, they were asked simply, "Do you know the answer to this question?"

When participants had access to the internet, they were less likely to say, "I know the answer." The mere presence of a search engine made them less confident in their own brains.

It's a good illustration of just how fundamentally the internet has changed how we interact with our own minds.

Is the internet really making us dumber?

Knowledge has always been distributed across members of our communities. No one individual can know everything, and we often "offload" some knowledge onto others. It's okay that I don't know how to fix a leaky faucet, because I can call Mark.

The internet, psychologists theorize, is the equivalent of a giant, all-knowing Mark. It doesn't just know how to fix leaky faucets. It knows everything. With our smartphones by our sides at all times, we can offload our responsibility to understand the world to the internet. And the more we offload our intelligence to the internet, the less of it we need to store in our brains. Psychologists have seen this in the lab. People are less willing to remember information when they believe it's saved in a computer.

And as this newest study by Canadian psychologists suggests, we seem to become less sure of our own brains when internet access is nearby.

One possibility is that the internet actually makes us more humble."We suggested that people might be engaging in a sort of social comparison between themselves and the internet," Amanda Ferguson, one of the study's authors, writes me in an email. "This would reduce their 'feeling-of-knowing' the answer (since they're comparing themselves to the all-knowing internet), and ultimately lead them to answer fewer questions."

Alternatively, the internet raises the stakes for us to be correct. When a friend asks if you know the capital of Canada, you'd feel more responsible for the accuracy of the information if you had a smartphone in your hands. It ups the costs of being wrong. So it's better not to answer.

Whether this is good or bad depends on context. But here's an optimistic takeaway: It's not so bad for us to be reminded there's an impossibly large amount of information in the world, to take a step back and be humbled and in awe of it.

In the study, when participants with internet access did give answers based on their own knowledge, they were more likely to be correct. The internet highlights what we don't know, but makes us more accurate when we feel like we do.

And the internet isn't a flawless catalog of information, either: "Even when people were using the internet to search for answers in our study, their accuracy was only at around 83 percent," Ferguson says. "So our external knowledge store - i.e., the internet - seems to have a few flaws of its own. "
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The internet isn't making us stupid. It's making us humble.

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The internet makes us less confident in our brains - and that's not a bad thing.

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Is Smart Technology Making Us Dumb? - Miya

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Is Smart Technology Making Us Dumb? - Miya

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We still haven't grappled with the deep questions Nicholas Carr brought to public attention in his seminal book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains(2010). Is the internet making us dumb? Is the technology causing us cognitive loss or debilitation? Carr focused on the internet, which is, by design, a dumb technology-a general-purpose digital communication infrastructure that pushed "intelligence" to the ends of the network.

Since my own book Re-Engineering Humanity, co-authored by Evan Sellinger, was published, I'm often asked: Is smart technology making us dumb? My first reaction is to bounce a few questions back. Can technology really be smart? Is your question whether our use of certain technologies is making us dumb? Or is your question about technology companies?

Eventually, I return to the original question and respond like a lawyer: It depends. It's yes, in some ways and no in others. Before addressing it, we must acknowledge the conceptual mistake of boiling intelligence down to a binary-smart versus dumb-as if it exists on a single dimension. There are many different types of intelligence that matter, and how technology affects different types also varies considerably.

Once I'm done meandering, however I answer yes. I believe we may be making ourselves dumber when we outsource thinking and rely on supposedly smart tech to micromanage our daily lives for the sake of cheap convenience.

The internet provides us with seemingly limitless data, prose, images, video and other raw materials that could in theory enhance our intelligence and enable us to become more knowledgeable, to be more skillful or to otherwise use actionable intelligence. Maybe we could improve our decision-making, reflect on our beliefs, interrogate our own biases, and so on.

But do we? Who does? Who exactly is made smarter? And how? And with respect to what? Are you and I, and our siblings and children, engaging with the seemingly limitless raw materials in a manner that makes us more capable, more intelligent? Or do we find ourselves outsourcing more and more? Do we find ourselves mindlessly following scripts written or designed by others?

We're easily led to believe that we're extending our minds and becoming more intelligent with a little help from the digital tech tools, when in reality, those are often just illusions, sales pitches optimized to pave the path of least resistance. Every time someone suggests they've extended their mind with their smartphone, that they are thinking through and with their phones, I respond by asking them about who's doing what thinking.

Are they extending their mind or extending the reach of others into their mind? When you rely on GPS, who's doing the route planning? Who is gaining what intelligence? Are you smarter because of GPS? What impact does outsourcing navigation and awareness of your surroundings have on your capabilities? Certainly, Waze or Google gain intelligence about you, your surroundings and even others around you. That could be good or bad, but it's not really extending your mind or expanding your intelligence.

As everyone knows by now, many digital tech companies know a lot about each of us. Advertisers, Cambridge Analytica-like firms, large platforms and so on. They've gained considerable intelligence and, as a result, power. But note that for the most part, they feed on different raw materials. They don't get smart by consuming the same materials that we're fed.

They gain actionable intelligence by collecting treasure troves of data, gleaned from digital networked technologies. Everything that occurs on the internet-every interaction, transaction, communication, etc.-everything is data, strings of 0s and 1s. And all of our activities generate data. Digital tech companies gain actionable intelligence by collecting and processing data, mostly about how we behave in response to different stimuli-what we're fed. This empowers those companies. They may, for example, personalize their services to induce desirable behaviors, such as sustained engagement. Or they may develop new salable insights about consumers. I could go on. But the bottom line is that digital tech companies get smarter, more capable, more powerful.

But what about you and me? Do we also get smarter? Do we extend our minds and thereby gain intelligence and increased capabilities? What actual capabilities are extended or enhanced? Are they in fact practiced? If so, to what end? What actionable intelligence improves the quality of your life?

Upon reflection, I remain uncertain. Again, the lawyer in me emerges, and I can reach no definitive evaluation. Does that say something about me and my reflective capacity, the ambiguity of empirical evidence, or something else?

The internet promised the library of Alexandria at our fingertips, delivered instantaneously wherever and whenever we like. It delivered that and much, much more. One might describe the exchange in Faustian terms, as trading one's soul for knowledge. Putting aside concerns about what's been lost (our soul, humanity, etc.), it's not even clear that the promised knowledge was delivered. To make matters worse, evaluating the Faustian bargain is even more difficult when the intellectual capabilities required to do so seem to be waning, at least for many of us.

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Yes and no: there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the question

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The Internet connectivity brings positives and negatives - Smitha :) 

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The Internet connectivity brings positives and negatives - Smitha :) 

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The internet has revolutionized the world. Every facet of people's lives has been touched by this technology-from work and entertainment to education, shopping, and personal relationships.

The network certainly has made many things easier. We can shop, study, and work from home. We can instantly communicate with anyone near or far. And we have a wealth of information at our fingertips.

But what has the internet taken from us? Has our attention span shortened? Do we spend any time doing nothing at all, or do we need to feel connected 24 hours a day?

Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, has published "100 Things We've Lost to the Internet."

The book's description notes: "In 100 glimpses of that pre-internet world, Paul presents a captivating record of the world before cyberspace-from voicemails to blind dates to punctuation to civility. There are the small losses: postcards, the blessings of an adolescence largely spared of documentation, the Rolodex, and the genuine surprises at high school reunions. But there are larger repercussions, too: weaker memories, the inability to entertain oneself, and the utter demolition of privacy."

Members of the University of Miami community share their thoughts about the internet, not only indicating what society may have lost, but also what has been gained from this life-changing technology.
Dayton Whitman, sophomore majoring in theatre arts What have we lost to the internet?

"We have lost a sense of vulnerability and interpersonal skills. I have a friend who has a small brother who does not get off his iPad, and it is so hard to talk to him now. He cannot keep eye contact in a conversation, and he has no close friends. Now, the metaverse scares me because we have lost so much already that to have a fake community that is all online is terrifying. You don't have to leave your house anymore to get entertainment and connect with people through phone or metaverse. We need human interaction. If we don't have it, that's unhealthy and toxic."
What have we gained?
"We have gained a level of awareness. Growing up in America, I am born with a sense of ignorance. I do not understand what it is to grow up in a Third World country, but with social media and news, at least I am able to see what is going on. Everything is at my fingertips; so, I can research it. That is important because people who have gained awareness have started nonprofits or tried to start solutions to different problems. You cannot find solutions if you don't know that there is a problem."

Ilana Simmons, first-year student majoring in global health on the pre-med track
What have we lost to the internet?

"We have lost the ability to form meaningful connections with people because using the internet is not like being face-to-face. You have to develop different skills, so I feel like the strength of personal relationships has been lost."

"We have gained a better ability to stay in touch with people. So, for instance, I can stay in touch with friends who go to other colleges. Through the internet I stay in touch with them. It would be harder if there were no internet. It is easier to study with the internet. Although at times the system can crash."
Jacob Li, a senior studying biomedical engineering

What have we lost to the internet?
"Physical hard copy texts. A lot of the research I do for classes is online and not necessarily in the library. So, we don't get a physical feel for the text and there is an underappreciation for the works of artists because when you put it on an online format you are not able to appreciate the time and effort that it took to put those pages together."
Alexander Klein, sophomore majoring in exercise physiology What have we lost to the internet?
"Accessibility. It is easier for people to find information. But it is a double-edged sword because the information we find may not always be credible. People think that the independent research they do is Googling but that is not really research. It may not be a credible source."

"As a society, we have lost a lot of communications skills. A lot of people find it easier to hide behind a screen because they can remain anonymous behind a pseudonym and hide their problems behind that screen."
Nicholas Iwanicki, University Archivist, University of Miami Libraries What have we lost to the internet?
"We have gained new ways to communicate. We have gained other ways to communicate with people who may be in another part of the country or the world. It may be someone you have never met before. It is easier to meet people that way."
What have we gained from the internet?
"One of the things that the internet has discouraged is the ability of audiences to physically interact with digitized objects. While it is easy to read a letter or view a photograph on a website, researchers do not get to have the full experience of touching and holding those materials. As the University archivist, one of the exciting parts of my job is enabling our students, faculty, staff, and the public to work with UM historic collections in person, providing a more enriching research experience. For many of our students, this is their first time getting to handle historic artifacts and documents, and it is fun to see them forge direct connections to past UM students."
Laura Kohn-Wood, dean, School of Education and Human Development What have we lost to the internet?
"Perhaps the greatest gain from the internet is the access that researchers have to historic materials around the world. This is a massive advantage for scholars who cannot travel to use research collections or may access digitized resources from the field. Connecting audiences to digital content is vital for knowledge creation and discovery not just in academia, but for the general public as well."
What have we gained from the internet?
"From my perspective, the internet has challenged personal and social interactions, particularly among young people for whom relationships have played out via devices for their entire life. COVID-19 only exacerbated this issue. I think that the rapid increase in anxiety among youth-in particular the nearly doubling of anxiety issues over the past decade among college students-is related to having lost fundamental peer socialization and physical intimacy skills, making the kinds of normal in-person interactions we take for granted, fraught with uncertainty. Further, we are currently observing multiple children using the internet as a vehicle to express anger, rage, or vindictiveness in the form of threats of violence."

"As an educator (and an old, pre-world wide web person), the internet has dramatically changed our lives. With regard to education, the internet has given us the ability, within seconds, to access an almost infinite amount of information and knowledge. If knowledge is power, then all of us have become more powerful when we are able to access the array of intellectual resources, references, information, and science.

Of course, the danger of this democratizing of knowledge is the lack of curated information and the proliferation of misinformation, myths, and lies. Therefore, the need for internet literacy in the broader area of media literacy is critical, particularly for children to develop the skills to navigate their information-saturated world.
Antonio Mora, visiting assistant professor of practice, School of Communication What have we gained from the internet?
"The other aspect of increased knowledge access for educators, particularly in higher education is the premium that should be placed on innovative pedagogy and learning sciences. If people can use a search engine to quickly find the answer to a question on their smartphone, more of their time in the classroom should be spent engaging with information more intensively and more tangibly. The learning curve is steepest when one attempts to apply knowledge to relevant areas, incorporate information, synthesize and creatively problem solve. Pedagogical approaches like discussion or problem-based learning, service learning, and active engagement can reinforce and deepen the integration of new knowledge to advance student comprehension and competency."
What has the internet taken from us?
"The internet transformed the way we work, the way we consume entertainment, the way we connect with other people, and the way we get informed. As a journalist, the unlimited access to information has been a godsend. The internet has also allowed far greater diversity of opinion, with national news no longer controlled by a small number of news organizations. I also love the interconnectivity that social media provides, allowing us to easily stay in touch with friends."

"As often happens with great innovations, the internet has brought with it all sorts of negative consequences. Social media has coarsened the political dialogue, contributing greatly to the extreme political polarization we have in the U.S. The 'democratization' of news, where anyone now has access to an online 'megaphone,' has increased fake news and the propagation of conspiracy theories. On a more individual level, the internet and our mobile devices have allowed people to recede into their cocoons and reduced in-person interactions. I also worry that people are reading less."

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The internet's connectivity brings positives and negatives

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Members of the University community opine on how this technological network-first made public in 1993-has impacted society.

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In this day and age, it's hard to imagine life without the internet. Accessible via our PCs, laptops, tablets and phones, it has permeated society and transformed the way we go about our day to day business. But is it actually a good thing? DisCUss takes a look at the good and bad points of the worldwide web.

Good: You have an enormous library of information and resources at your fingertips

Bad: Not every source is reliable or trustworthy

How wonderful that almost all of the questions we ponder, from the sensible "where is my nearest takeaway" to the inane "what would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way" (actual search), can all be Googled in seconds. The internet is a powerful source of knowledge for all of us, certainly few students could imagine getting though their studies without this amazing research tool.

However, it is important to remember that not everything you see or read on the internet is 100% reliable or genuine. Online encyclopedia giant Wikipedia is a prime example of this: it is created and edited by volunteers around the world, but "anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism." Best to keep this in mind before you reference an article in your assignments.

Good: It's really easy to keep abreast of current news and events

Bad: Internet can also be used as a platform to spread negative messages

The internet is a fantastic global resource for current affairs and entertainment news, with many channels now updated in real time. Important campaigns and messages can be promoted, such as health awareness campaigns, so that it reaches a greater audience and ensures we are well-informed. Most news articles now allow readers the option to comment and voice their opinions too, which make us more engaged with the world and sparks interesting debates and viewpoints.

The downside, as with any platform, is that people can also use it to share propaganda and/or inappropriate content. The challenge is trying to control how these messages are spread, as they can reach vulnerable and impressionable audiences.

Good: You can do all your banking online, and shopping on the web is so easy

Bad: Accounts can be hacked into

From food shopping to keeping track of your outgoings, the internet allows us to manage our finances and buy the things we want with relative ease, all without having to venture out of the door. While businesses are constantly developing ways to make your online customer accounts more secure, it is worth remembering that accounts are at risk of being hacked, so ensure your passwords are changed regularly, and where possible, try not to save your card details on shopping accounts.

Good: Social media means I can keep in touch with friends old and new

Bad: Social media changes the way we interact, and not everyone is who they say they are

Social media can sometimes get a bad rap, but we cannot deny it has become a prevalent part of society, and a key tool many of us use to keep in touch with loved ones or expand our virtual social circles. Long distance friendships can be maintained, conversations can be struck up over shared content and we are allowed a glimpse into the lives of others, which will always be a source of fascination.

However many people argue that this is making us lazy in our interactions, and accuse social media users of 'cherry picking' the content they share with friends, so that it makes their lives appear a lot more exciting and glamorous than it really is, inadvertently making others feel inferior (#FOMO).

Good: When you're bored, the internet provides entertainment

Bad: It can become addictive

The internet hosts a plethora of technology and entertainment. Our impatient natures are satisfied by the ability to instantly conjure games, music and videos. It can provide a talking point among friends, keep the kids quiet for hours or provide you with a window of escapism from a stressful day. But have you ever just been scrolling through your Instagram feed or playing a game and then before you know it, it's 2am and you haven't even had your dinner yet? Yeah...we've all been there. Emerging research has indicated that the effects of using technology can mimic those of drugs and alcohol, where the brain's frontal cortex - which controls executive functioning, including impulse control - is affected in exactly the same way as it would be through cocaine use. Technology is so hyper-arousing that it raises dopamine levels - the feel-good neurotransmitter most involved in the addiction dynamic.

Our verdict?

The internet continues to be an enigma: we are still learning about its capabilities, and new ideas are constantly being developed to improve and expand usability. While it's true that some of the negatives can never be completely eliminated, it is fair to say that through education and experience we as a community are gradually becoming savvier. Awareness campaigns surrounding cybersecurity and online conduct are certainly helping us to recognise how to protect ourselves and others online, and recent research has shown a decrease in the amount of time we are spending on sites such as Facebook, perhaps suggesting that the novelties of social media are less overpowering.

What are your thoughts? Do you think the internet has a positive effect on your life?

Comments

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Is the internet good or bad? - DISCUSS | BLOG | CU

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The internet - an amazing invention or not all it's cracked up to be? DisCUss look at the positives and negatives of the worldwide web

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Internet making our brains different, not dumb - Miya

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Internet making our brains different, not dumb - Miya

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A decade from now, Google won't make us "stupid," the Internet may make us more literate in a different kind of way and efforts to protect individual anonymity will be even more difficult to achieve, according to many of the experts surveyed for a look at "The Future of the Internet" in 2020.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center asked nearly 895 technology "stakeholders and critics" about their expectations for the Internet 10 years from now. Among those queried: representatives from the Institute for the Future, Association of Internet Researchers, professors, Internet law and privacy experts, Internet pioneers and those in the business world.
One of the questions they were asked was whether Google, in some ways is a metaphor for the ease of information on the Internet, "will make people stupid" because of society's over-reliance on the search engine and the Web for everything from addresses to easily copied school reports to "Googling" prospective suitors or employees.

The notion was addressed in a 2008 story for The Atlantic titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by author Nicholas Carr.

Carr wrote that "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."

But, he noted, his "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."

Making 'better choices'
In the Pew study, 76 percent of the respondents said they agree that by 2020, "people's use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid."

Another 21 percent disagreed, and said a decade from now, "people's use of the Internet has not enhanced human intelligence and it could even be lowering the IQs of most people who use it a lot. Nicholas Carr was right: Google makes us stupid."

Carr, also the author of the book, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google," was among those surveyed for the report, and said he stands by what he wrote. "But I would add that the Net's effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores," he said in the Pew report.

"What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking."

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said just as in society at large, "a lot of the people in this expert group do feel some level of stress by the volume of the information that's flowing into their lives, and the ways in which they skim over material as they are browsing."

Yet, he said, "when they think 10 years from now, are we going to be collectively smarter or not, the answer is pretty overwhelmingly that they do think so, that perhaps individuals will lose their way, but that as a society, we'll get smarter collectively.

"We measure intelligence in a certain way now, and maybe the whole nature of intelligence will be changing 10 years from now," he said. "It won't necessarily be how much you can retain, how much your hard drive can hold in your head, but it'll be the way you can assess information, that you can think critically, that you can synthesize information."

Sandra Kelly, 3M Corp.'s market research manager and a participant in the study, said she doesn't think "an adult's IQ can be influenced much either way by reading anything, and I would guess that smart people will use the Internet for smart things and stupid people will use it for stupid things in the same way that smart people read literature and stupid people read crap fiction.

"On the whole, having easy access to more information will make society as a group smarter though."

Enhance reading, writing, knowledge?
When asked whether by 2020 it will be clear that the Internet enhances and improves, or diminishes and endangers reading, writing, and "the intelligent rendering of knowledge," 65 percent said the Internet will foster such improvements; 32 percent disagreed, and 3 percent did not respond.

"I think that a marginally greater number of people will be engaged in creating media - visual as well as text - and as a result, the overall literacy will increase," said Alex Halavais, vice president of the Association of Internet Researchers, said in the report.

Halavais, in an e-mail interview, said "I'm at the Digital Media and Learning conference this week, where no one would suggest the Internet and search engines are making kids less smart. It does create new issues of literacy, in the same way that the printing press created new capacities and standards of literacy.

"The media ecology is shifting, and what makes us literate is shifting with it. The most literate in the search society are not those who hold the most information in their head, but those who can find information and learn new things the quickest."

Sharing more - and less
"Ten years from now, it's likely people are going to be sharing more information, but there'll probably be more levels of control over it," said Anthony Townsend, a study participant and research director for the Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future, in an interview with msnbc.com.

"You can already see this happening, he said. "Young people are very sophisticated about what they make public and what they keep private, and how they create different tiers of friends. One of the things Facebook has done is completely render the word 'friend' meaningless, because there's now many different kinds of friends.

"You're going to see, I think, technologies that let people say what kind of friend you are, or manage it that way without necessarily telling you that."

David Clark, senior research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said in the report that 10 years from now, "we may lose our ability to write, in the literal sense that students are no longer taught penmanship. We will either type or print like 8-year-olds.

"But I think even e-mail stimulates the putting of ideas into writing. And while we may read only on electronic media, I think the book and the scholarly work will survive as important means both of transferring knowledge and of entertainment."

'Literary culture is in trouble'
But Patrick Tucker, senior editor of The Futurist magazine, said in the report that "Literary culture is in trouble ... We are spending less time reading books, but the amount of pure information that we produce as a civilization continues to expand exponentially. That these trends are linked, that the rise of the latter is causing the decline of the former, is not impossible.

"One could draw reassurance from today's vibrant Web culture if the general surfing public, which is becoming more at home in this new medium, displayed a growing propensity for literate, critical thought," he said. "But take a careful look at the many blogs, post comments, Facebook pages, and online conversations that characterize today's Web 2.0 environment," he wrote.

"This type of content generation, this method of 'writing' is not only subliterate, it may actually undermine the literary impulse .... Hours spent texting and e-mailing, according to this view, do not translate into improved writing or reading skills."

Anonymity and privacy issues
The "Future of the Internet" report is the fourth since 2005 from Pew and Elon University. Some themes - such as "the right balance between anonymity and privacy on the one hand, and disclosure and sharing on the other hand" have been recurring ones over the years, said Rainie.

In the new report, 55 percent said they believe Internet users will still be able to communicate anonymously in 2020, while 41 percent said a decade from now that "anonymous online activity is sharply curtailed." (Three percent did not respond to the question.)

"The environment in the social media world has changed some of the nature of that debate," said Rainie. "But the basic sense that there is a struggle over what's the balance point to strike on that absolutely continues."

Stewart A. Baker, Internet legal specialist formerly with the Department of Homeland Security, said in the report that anonymity online "will gradually become a lot like anonymity in the real world. When we encounter it, we'll take a firm grip on our wallet and leave the neighborhood as soon as possible - unless we're doing something we're ashamed of."

In an interview, Baker said 10 years from now, just as today, there "may still be pockets of anonymity; it is after all the norm today, and anonymity is something that we all value for ourselves - just not for others."

It "will evolve into a kind of caveat emptor space," he said. "You'll know you're taking risks when you go there, but you'll value the anonymity enough to live with the risks."

Townsend, of the Institute for the Future, said "If you look at the last 15 years of the Web and the Internet, it's been a pretty straight line of governments imposing their sovereignty on cyberspace.

"The whole notion of anonymity on the Internet is one of these vestigial principles or kind of obsolete assumptions about how the Internet actually works ... It's a pretty trivial exercise today for a government to identify the data or activities of any individual online relatively quickly, unless they take really extreme measures to protect themselves."

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Internet making our brains different, not dumb

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Google won't make us "stupid," the Internet may make us more literate in a different kind of way and efforts to protect individual anonymity will be even more difficult to achieve, according to many of the experts surveyed for a look at "The Future of the Internet."

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Is technology making kids dumber? - Raania

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Is technology making kids dumber? - Raania

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Every time they send a text message, watch a YouTube video, log on to Facebook and plug in their iPods, today's kids are getting stupider.

At least, that's what Mark Bauerlein argues in his provocative book " The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future."

Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has spent the last few years touring the country evangelizing about the dangers of exposing the young to technology.

His love-it-or-despise it book, newly released in paperback, has spawned heated arguments among parents, teachers and students who are spending more and more time plugged in.A survey released last month by the state Department of Education found 57 percent of New Jersey high school students spend three hours or more surfing the internet, playing video games or watching TV on an average school day. That includes the 31 percent who said they are devoting five hours or more of their day to sitting in front of some kind of screen.

Should we be worried?

We spoke with Bauerlein about teens, technology and the dangers of plugging in and tuning out.

Q: Thanks to the internet and technology, today's young people have almost immediate access to nearly all of human knowledge. How can that make them dumber?
A: Yes, that's the disappointing thing. All the knowledge in the universe at their fingertips, and yet on the existing measures of knowledge and skills they keep producing such disappointing scores. Why?

Because the web means to them not a window onto the world of history, civics, geography, philosophy, literature and art. It's a window onto what they really care about-- one another.

A 15-year-old doesn't worry about what a 40-year-old thinks. He worries about what other 15-year-olds think. She doesn't ponder what happened at Omaha Beach in 1945. She ponders what happened at the party last Friday.

Social life eclipsing all other things. That's just the nature of adolescence in America, and now it has a whole new arsenal to amplify it.
Q: Other authors argue today's children and teens-- the Millennial Generation-- are actually getting smarter. They cite higher I.Q. levels and long-term academic studies. Why do you say the opposite?
A: Well, it looks like the IQ gains have slowed considerably and when we look at certain areas, such as verbal intelligence, things are pretty flat. And I'm not sure what academic studies you mean, but it's certainly true that more kids are taking AP courses and going to college than ever before. But consider these numbers: Reading scores for 17-year-olds are flat since the 1970s and down since the early 90s; Remediation rates for college students are now at 43 percent for two-year schools and 29 percent for four-year schools; and literacy rates for college grads are down since the early 90s.

When the Chronicle of Higher Education polled college professors on the writing skills of students, only 6 percent of them rates the kids "very well prepared," in spite of the fact that young people are writing more words now than ever before. And let's put those results in the context noted above. Today there are more public libraries, colleges and universities, museums, historic sites and after-school programs than ever before. And we have more educational programming on TV, plus, of course, the web. In other words, young people have more access to knowledge than at any time in history. And yet, that great outflux of intelligence that techno-philes promised back in the 1990s hasn't happened.
Q: Between texting, e-mailing and blogging it seems like today's kids are writing more than ever. Isn't that a good thing?
A: See my comment above. Also, it is a good thing for kids who would not be doing any writing otherwise. At least they are putting thoughts together in some printed form. But in the last NAEP writing exam for 17-year-olds, we got a small improvement at the very low end of the scale, but no gains at all in the middle-to-upper ends.

Why? Because the writing kids do is aimed mainly at one another. This makes them groove adolescent habits-- diction, syntax, punctuation, spelling, etc. They fit the teen idiom, which means that when it comes to writing lengthy paragraphs, composing crisp arguments, finding the right word, and constructing neat transitions, the students fall down. They've grooved another lingo, and because writing is a deep habit, they can't easily break out of it.

Q: Aren't you unfairly blaming technology for some of these problems? Isn't the real problem bad parenting?
A: Maybe some of the criticisms are unfair, but we have so many technophiles and web enthusiasts out there pushing these practices in schools and classrooms, not to mention a puerile youth culture now purveyed largely through digital tools, that firm and stern pushback is in order.

You're right about parents, though. All too many of them like the tools. They serve as babysitter.
Q: Did you write this book because of what you were seeing in your own classroom?
A: A little bit, but the ideas formed mainly while I was out of academic, working in the research office of the National Endowment for the Arts. There, we conducted national population surveys of young people's arts and culture habits, and in 2002 we reached a troubling finding: The percentage of 18-24-year-olds who read any work of literature of any kind or quality or length or genre for their own pleasure or edification fell 17 points from 1982 to 2002 (60 percent to 43 percent).
Q: You argue that technology is helping young people become more and more obsessed with trivial things, from "American Idol" to school gossip. But in the last presidential election, young people were more involved than ever. Didn't they prove you wrong?
A: In truth, their voting rates didn't surpass voting rates in 1972, when the voting age was first lowered. We did get a bump on 2003, yes, but it was only 2 percentage points, 51 percent.

That means barely half of 18-29-year-olds bothered to take an hour out of their day to cast a vote. This is a disappointment when we consider that Time Magazine in January 2008 declared the coming year to be "The Year of the Youth Vote." The real story behind the election and the youth vote isn't the raw numbers, but the huge lean toward the Dems. It was 2-for-1 for Obama, a preference rate never before seen. If the Repubs can't reduce that ratio, they're in trouble for a long time.
Q: Cell phones, iPods and the internet are not going away. So, what's the solution?
A: There is no solution. We are heading down into the least scenes of "Fahrenheit 451," when those few lovers of books wander the woods memorizing their favorite tome while the rest of the society sits at home watching interactive soap operas on huge screens in their bedrooms.

Q: Your book has made you an online target on blogs and websites. I've seen you called a Luddite, an old fogey and "Grandpa Simpson." How do you respond?
They're right. I crossed over a few years back, and my favorite movie now is, of course, "Gran Torino."

But, you know, I think it's the responsibility of the elders to criticize the juniors. Heck, why should a 15-year-old care about what happened on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial back in 1963 when Martin Luther King approached the podium? Only the voice of age reminds them that history didn't begin on their 13th birthday, that the most important event of the year isn't the moment they get their driver's license, and that when Betty dumps Billy the world doesn't need to hear about it.

And it's good for the juniors to argue back.
Q: I'm sure you must have gotten an angry e-mail or tweet or two from kids upset at you for writing a book that calls them dumb.
A: Yes, I get lots of e-mails from the young. One began, "Dear Sir: You are an ass."

It continued in that vein. They are insulted and offended and angry-- and that's a good thing. It shows they're paying attention and they care enough about intellectual values to shoot, to maim. I answer every one I receive, and we have good exchanges, and sometimes I concede a point here and there. I like nothing better than to be proven wrong by a sharp 18-year-old. After all, we want every harsh judgement in the book to turn out flat wrong.
Q: You have a young son. How do you plan to handle his inevitable plea for a cell phone?
A: I'm building a giant bubble in the back yard where he'll be confined. I'll allow certain messages and media in, and disallow others.

In reality, the goal isn't removal, but balance. If I have an hour of reading time with my little guy and an hour of talking time (coaxing him into observations, judgements, opinions, reminiscences), I don't mind if he watches TV, plays games and fixates on screens for a while.
Q: What's next? Are you working on another book?
A: Perhaps an answer to the question implied above: What's the advice for parents? Perhaps this title: "How to Raise Smart Kids in a Dumb Culture."
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

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Is technology making kids dumber?: A Q&A with author Mark Bauerlein

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SCOTT LITUCHY/THE STAR-LEDGERA new study says New Jersey kids are spending large chunks of their days interacting with cell phones, computers, video games and TV. Is all of this technology making them dumber? Every time they send a text message,...

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

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

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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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We are becoming visual, not print oriented.

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Are attention spans really collapsing? Data shows UK public are worried – but also see benefits from technology-Izzy

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Are attention spans really collapsing? Data shows UK public are worried – but also see benefits from technology-Izzy

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Are attention spans really collapsing? Data shows UK public are worried – but also see benefits from technology

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It’s increasingly claimed that our attention spans are under attack from new technology, but the reality is more nuanced