Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? Page 5

  So, even though I spend lots of time on the Internet (fallen, pancake person that I am), I can’t help being reminded of the Greek philosopher who attributed his long life to avoiding dinner parties. If only I could avoid the equally distracting Internet, which, in its promise of connectedness and expanded knowledge, is really a substitute social phenomenon.

  The “entire world” the Internet seems to offer harmonizes strangely with the apple from the Tree of Knowledge offered to Eve—ah, we don’t believe in those old myths? (I guess one company guru did.)

  Well, the only hope I see hovering in the Neverland (now real) where the Internet does its work of feeding smart people amphetamines and “dumb” people tranquilizers is that the expanding puddle of boiling, bubbling hot milk will eventually coagulate and a new, unforeseen pattern will emerge out of all that activity that thought it was aiming at a particular goal but (as is usual with life) was really headed someplace else, which nobody knew about.

  That makes it sound like the new mysticism for a new Dark Ages. Well, we’ve already bitten the apple. Good luck to those much younger than I am, who may be around to see either the new Heaven or the new Hell.

  What’s Missing Here?

  Matthew Ritchie

  Artist

  Supposedly the Internet was invented at CERN. If CERN is really responsible for this infinitely large filing cabinet, filled to bursting by lunatics, salesmen, hobbyists, and pornographers and fitting into my pocket folded up like Masefield’s Box of Delights, then CERN has posed an even larger threat to the world than its fabled potential production of black holes.

  Nonetheless, I use the Internet—or does it use me? Is it a new cultural ecology, an ecology of mind? If it is, who are the real predators, and who is being eaten online? Is it me?

  Once I longed to create an interface that would simulate my interaction with the real world. Now I realize that the interface I want is the real world. Can the Internet give me that back?

  Is it an archive? I can learn a new idea every day on the Internet. I have learned about many old ideas and many false ideas. I have read many obvious lies. This ability to indefinitely sustain a lie is celebrated as freedom. Denial enters stage left, cloaked as skepticism. We need a navigation system we can trust. Someday soon we’ll need our twentieth-century experts and interpreters to be replaced by twenty-first-century creator-pilots.

  Is it an open system? It seems impossible to find out on the Internet what it really costs the planet to sustain the Internet and its toys, what it costs our culture to think, to play, to fondle and adore itself. Seven of the world’s largest corporations own all the routers and cables. Everyone pays the ferryman.

  Is it liberating? The old, the poor, and the uneducated are locked out. Everyone else is locked in; studies show mass users locked in reversed and concentric learning patterns, seeking only the familiar—even (perhaps especially) if novelty is their version of the same old thing. As a shared space, it is a failure, celebrating only those who obey its rules. We sniff out our digital blazes, following the circular depletion of our own curiosity reservoirs. We are running out of selves.

  Is it really just about communication? To travel is to enter a world of monastic chimes and insectile clicks, as unloved cell phone chatter is replaced by mobile anchorites locked in virtual communion with their own agendas and prejudices, cursing when their connections fail and they are returned to the real, immediate world. But unplugging only returns us, and them, to a space-in-waiting, designed and ordered by the same system.

  Is it a new space? If this is true, then immediately I am drawn to the implied space inevitably also being created, the anti-Net. If it’s a new space, how big are we when we are online? But what’s really missing here? Meaning, touch, time, and place are what’s missing here. We need a holographic rethinking of scale and content.

  But like you, I’m back every day, “collaborating,” as they say. Because there is something being built, or building itself, in this not-yet-space. Perhaps the Internet we know is merely a harbinger and—like Ulysses returning dirty, false, and lame—it will truly reveal itself only when we’re ready. Perhaps it will unfold itself soon and help us bring the real ecology back to life, unveil the conspiracies, shatter the mirrors, tear down the walls, rejoice, and bring forth the promise that is truly waiting in us, waiting only for its release. I’m ready now.

  Power Corrupts

  Daniel C. Dennett

  Philosopher; University Professor, codirector, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

  We philosophers don’t agree about much, but one simple slogan that just about everybody accepts is “ought implies can.” You aren’t obliged to do something impossible (for you). In the past, this handily excused researchers from scouring the world’s libraries for obscure works that might have anticipated their apparently novel and original discoveries, since life is short and the time and effort that would have to be expended to do a thorough job of canvassing would be beyond anybody’s means. Not anymore. Everybody has all-but-free and all-but-instantaneous access to the world’s archives on just about every topic. A few seconds with Google Scholar can give you a few hundred more peer-reviewed articles to check out. But this is really more scholarly can-do than I want. I don’t want to spend my precious research time scrolling through miles of published work, even with a well-tuned search engine! So (like everyone else, I figure), I compromise. I regret the loss of innocence imposed on me by the Internet. “I could have done otherwise, but I didn’t” is the constant background refrain of all the skimpings I permit myself, all the shortcuts I take, and thus a faint tinge of guilt hangs over them all.

  I also find that I am becoming a much more reactive thinker, responding—how can I do otherwise?—to a host of well-justified requests for my assistance (it will only take a few minutes) and postponing indefinitely my larger, more cumbersome projects that require a few uninterrupted hours just to get rolling. This tiny Edge essay is a prime example. It would be easy to resist this compression of my attention span if there weren’t so many good reasons offered for taking these interruptions seriously. To date, my attempts to fend off this unwelcome trend by raising the threshold of my imperviousness have failed to keep up with the escalation. Stronger measures are called for. But do I regret the time spent writing this piece? No, on reflection I can convince myself that it may actually bring more valuable illumination to more people than a whole philosophical monograph on mereology or modal realism (don’t ask). But will I ever get back to my book writing?

  As Lord Acton famously said (I know—I just did a search to make sure I remembered it correctly—he said it in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887): “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We are all today in possession of nearly absolute power in several—but not all—dimensions of thinking, and since this hugely distorts the balance between what is hard and what is easy, it may indeed corrupt us all in ways we cannot prevent.

  The Rediscovery of Fire

  Chris Anderson

  Curator, TED Conferences, TED Talks

  Amid the apocalyptic wailing over the Internet-inflicted demise of print, one countertrend deserves a hearing. The Web has allowed the reinvention of the spoken word. Thanks to an enormous expansion of low-cost bandwidth, the cost of online video distribution has fallen almost to zero. As a result, recorded talks and lectures are spreading across the Web like wildfire. They are tapping into something primal and powerful.

  Before Gutenberg, we had a different technology for communicating ideas and information. It was called talking. Human-to-human speech is powerful. It evolved over millions of years, and there’s a lot more happening than just the words passing from brain to brain. There’s modulation, tone, emphasis, passion. And the listener isn’t just listening. She’s watching. Subconsciously she notes the widening of the speaker’s eyes, the movement of the hands, the swaying of the body, the responses o
f other listeners. It all registers and makes a difference to the way the receiving brain categorizes and prioritizes the incoming information. By increasing the motivation to understand, the speaker’s lasting effect on the intellectual world of the listener may be far greater than the same words in print.

  Read a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and you may nod in agreement. But then track down a video of the man in action, delivering those same words in front of an energized crowd. It’s a wholly different experience. You feel the force of the words. Their intent seems clearer, more convincing. You end up motivated, inspired. And so throughout history, when people have wanted to persuade, they have gathered a crowd together and made their case, often with startling effect.

  If nonverbal communication has a far greater impact than verbal, how did books catch on? Simple. They offered scale. It might be harder to explain and inspire via the printed page, but if you could, tens of thousands could benefit. And so we ended up with a mass communication culture in which, for a while, books and other printed media were the stars. And surprisingly, although radio and television could have reopened the door to spoken persuasion, they largely ignored the opportunity. In the increasingly frenetic battle for attention—and constrained by economic models that required mass audiences—victory went to entertainment, news, gossip, drama, and sports. “Talking heads” were regarded as bad television, and little effort went into figuring out how to present them in an interesting way.

  Meanwhile in the academic world, the emphasis was on papers and research—and somehow teaching schedules settled on painfully long lectures as the default unit of verbal communication. Man in coat behind lectern reading notes, while audience snoozes. All the intellectual brilliance in the world matters not a whit if the receiving brains can’t register it as interesting.

  Our ancestors would have been appalled. They knew better. Picture a starry night outside a village, in one of the ancient cradles of civilization. The people gather. The fire is lit. The drums beat. The dancers sway. A respected elder hushes the crowd. His face illuminated by flickering flames, he begins telling a story, his voice rising as the drama builds. The meaning of the story becomes apparent. The gathered crowd roars its approval. All of those present have understood something new. And more than that, they have felt it. They will act on it.

  This is a scene that has played countless times in our evolutionary history. It’s not unreasonable to think that our brains are fine-tuned to respond to evocative speech delivered in a powerful theatrical setting by a talented speaker.

  And now the Web is making it possible for such speakers to do what print authors have been doing for centuries: reach a mass audience. What’s more, the online explosion in serious talks could rectify the Web-inflicted damage to book authors’ bank balances and thereby make it possible to continue making a living as a contributor to the world’s intellectual commons. For one thing, when a talk goes viral, it boosts the author’s book sales and generates new connections, contracts, and consultancies. Significantly, it also creates demand for the author’s paid speaking appearances. Those $20K speaker fees soon add up. (An underreported effect of the increase in our time online is a growing craving for live experience. You can see it in the music industry, where all the revenue is moving away from album sales toward live performances. It’s easy to imagine musicians of the future making all their music free digitally but creating unforgettable live experiences for their fans at $100 a ticket. The same may be starting to happen for book authors.)

  Beyond that, there are numerous brilliant thinkers, researchers, and inventors who would never contemplate writing a book. They, too, now have the opportunity to become one of the world’s teachers. Their efforts, conveyed vividly from their own mouths, will bring knowledge, understanding, passion, and inspiration to millions.

  When Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” he meant, among other things, that every new medium spawns its own unexpected units of communication. In addition to the Web page, the blog, and the tweet, we are witnessing the rise of riveting online talks, long enough to inform and explain, short enough for mass impact.

  The Web has allowed us to rediscover fire.

  The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise

  June Cohen

  Director of media, TED Conference; TED Talks

  In the early days of the Web, when I worked at HotWired, I thought mainly about the new. We were of the future, those of us in that San Francisco loft—champions of new media, new tools, new thinking. But lately I’ve been thinking more about the old—about those aspects of human character and cognition that remain unchanged by time and technology. Over the past two decades, I’ve watched as the Internet changed the way we think and changed the way we live. But it hasn’t changed us fundamentally. In fact, it may be returning us to the intensely social animals we evolved to be.

  Every day, hundreds of millions of people use the Internet to blog, tweet, IM, and Facebook, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And it is. The tools are new, but the behaviors come naturally. Because the rise of social media is a reprise, a return to the natural order.

  When you take the long view—when you look at the Internet on an evolutionary timeline—everything we consider “old media” is actually very new. Books and newspapers became common only in the last two hundred years, radio and film in the last hundred, TV in the last fifty. If all of human history were compressed into a single twenty-four-hour day, media as we now know them emerged in the last two minutes before midnight.

  Before that, for the vast majority of human history, all media were social media. Media were what happened between people. Whether you think of the proverbial campfire, around which group rituals were performed and mythologies passed on, or of simple everyday interactions (teaching, gossiping, making music, making each other laugh), media were participatory. Media were social.

  So what we’re seeing today isn’t new. It’s neither the unprecedented flowering of human potential nor the death of intelligent discourse but, rather, the correction of a historical anomaly. There was a brief period of time in the twentieth century when “media” were understood as things professionals created for others to passively consume. Collectively, we have rejected this idea.

  Humans are natural-born storytellers, and media have always formed the social glue that held our communities together. But mass media in the twentieth century were so relentlessly one-way that they left room for little else. TV’s lure proved so powerful, so intoxicating, and so isolating that our older, participatory traditions—storytelling, music making, simply eating together as a family—fell away. TV created a global audience but destroyed the village in the process.

  Enter the Internet. As soon as the technology became available to us, we began instinctively re-creating the kinds of content and communities we evolved to crave. Our ancestors lived in small tribes, keeping their friends close and their children closer. They quickly shared information that could have life-or-death consequences. They gathered round the fire for rituals and storytelling that bonded them as a tribe. And watch us now. The first thing most of us do with a new communications technology is to gather our tribe around us— e-mailing photos to our parents, nervously friending our kids on Facebook.

  And we find every way we can to participate in media, to make it a group experience: We comment on YouTube videos, vote for contestants on reality shows, turn televised news events into live theater. Think of the millions who updated their Facebook status during Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony, as if to say: “I’m here. I’m with you. I’m part of this.” Our contributions may not be remarkable—they may be the written equivalent of shouting “Yay!” But then, the goal isn’t to be profound, it’s simply to belong.

  And we share stories. We’re designed to. If something surprises, delights, or disgusts us, we feel an innate urge to pass it on. The same impulse that makes Internet videos “go viral” has been spreading ideas (and jokes, and chain letters) t
hroughout history. This ancient process is merely accelerated online and made visible, quantifiable, and—almost—predictable.

  And of course we’re telling our own stories, too. We read regularly about celebrity bloggers with millions of fans, or Twitter campaigns that influence world events. But the truth is that most bloggers, vloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers are talking mainly to their friends. They compare lunches, swap songs, and share the small stories of their day. They’re not trying to be novelists or the New York Times. They’re just reclaiming their place at the center of their lives. When we were handed decentralized media tools of unprecedented power, we built a digital world strikingly similar to the tribal societies and oral cultures we evolved with.

  So the Internet is changing how I think about my role as a member of the media—not just as a conveyer of information but as a convener of people. The Internet is changing the way I think by making me think, at every moment, “What do I think of this? Whom do I want to tell about it?”

  And the Internet has me dreaming about our distant past, which feels a lot closer than you would think.

  The Internet and the Loss of Tranquility

  Noga Arikha

  Historian of ideas; author, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours

  I still remember typing essays on a much loved typewriter in my first year of university. Then the first computer, the first e-mail account, the slow yet fluid entry into a new digital world that felt strangely natural. The advent of the Internet age happened progressively; we saw it develop like a child born of many brains, a protean animal whose characteristics were at once predictable and unknown. As soon as the digital sphere had become a worldwide reality, recognizable as a new era, predictions and analyses about it grew. Edge itself was born as the creature was still growing new limbs. The tools for research and communication about this research developed, along with new thinking about mind-machine interaction, the future of education, the impact of the Internet on texts and writing, and the issues of filtering, relevance, learning, and memory.