Is the Internet a mixed blessing?

At the e-NC Authority, we speak of the Internet as being transformative because we have witnessed individuals, organizations and communities up-close. We have seen first-hand the transformation that the Internet can create within educational resources, applications and market access. Access to training, the capacity to recruit 21st century industries, global markets for local goods and crafts, extended and reconnected social contacts – the Internet is delivering all of this and more to citizens and businesses all over the globe. So the Internet must be a good thing, right?

Well once in a while, articles come along that stop us abruptly in our full-steam-ahead cheerleading for this technology and cause us to ponder otherwise. The most recent issue of the journal Atlantic (July-August 2008) is labeled “The Ideas Issue” as its focus is on ideas that are changing the way we live and work. The cover graphic poses the question “Is Google Making Us Stoopid? What the Internet is doing to Our Brains,” which is the title of this issue’s focal article by Nicholas Carr. The intriguing, and possibly troubling, premise of Carr’s article is that the Internet has been “tinkering with (our) brains, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” In short, changing the way we think.

Carr refers to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who pointed out in the 1960s that media are not just “passive channels of information…they also shape the process of thought.” Carr states that the Internet is “chipping away at (his) capacity for concentration and contemplation.” He suggest that our minds are changing – altering physically – as the norm for information intake becomes a jet of accelerated particles skipping around our neural nodes. The act of reading is the example he uses to drive home his point. His idea is that while we may actually be reading more than we ever have before, on average, due to the ubiquity of text on the Internet and text messaging on cell phone, it is a different type of reading that requires a different type of thinking. Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University is quoted as saying, “We are not only what we read; we are how we read.” She worries that while the Internet may promote efficiency and immediacy, it may also be weakening our ability to fully engage and make deep intuitive connections with the information we are processing. Wolf goes on to cite research that demonstrates that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, have a different neural circuitry for reading than do readers of Western languages. The expectation is that the circuits woven by our use of the Internet will be different from that woven by our reading of books and other printed words.

Like Carr and others he quotes, we are noticing a diminution of ability to focus on long pieces of writing. We scan the pages more, squirm, doze off in our chairs, and all too frequently add another book or magazine to the pile of things intend to “get back to.” Carr’s article has injected a new explanation for this impatience – the idea that our brains just aren’t what they used to be.