Losing our minds to the web

By Evgeny Morozov [Prospect]

In 1889 the Spectator published an article, “The Intellectual Effects of Electricity,” intended to provoke its Victorian readers. Robert Cecil, the prime minister, had recently given a speech to the Institution of Electrical Engineers in which “he admitted that only the future could prove whether the effect of the discovery of electricity… would tell for good or evil.” The authors attacked him for being soft on electricity. Its material effects were welcome—“imagine the hundred million of ploughing oxen now toiling in Asia, with their labour superseded by electric accumulators!”—but its intellectual effects were not.

Electricity had led to the telegraph, which in turn saw “a vast diffusion of what is called 'news,' the recording of every event, and especially of every crime.” Foreshadowing Marshall McLuhan by almost a century, the magazine deplored a world that was “for purposes of 'intelligence' reduced to a village” in which “a catastrophe caused by a jerry-builder of New York wakes in two hours the sensation of pity throughout the civilised world.” And while “certainly it increases nimbleness of mind… it does this at a price. All men are compelled to think of all things, at the same time, on imperfect information, and with too little interval for reflection.”

Fast forward 120 years, and similar criticisms abound. Consider an anti-Twitter lament by the New Yorker writer George Packer in February, published, of all places, on his blog: “There's no way for readers to be online, surfing, emailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world.” In May, even the US president Barack Obama—a self-confessed BlackBerry addict—complained about a “24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter,” adding that: “With iPods and iPads… information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.” Of course there is a price to pay for processing information. But the real question is: is the price too high?

Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley's favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the US (and will be published in Britain by Atlantic in September). It is an expanded version of an essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” printed in the Atlantic magazine in 2008, which struck a chord with several groups. Those worrying about Google's growing hold on our culture felt Carr was justified in going after it (though there was little about the search giant in the article). Those concerned with the accelerating rhythm of modern life, the dispersion of attention, and information overload—all arguably made worse by the internet—found a new ally. Those concerned with the trivialisation of intellectual life by blogs, tweets, and YouTube videos of cats also warmed to Carr's message. Online magazine Slate has already compared The Shallows to Silent Spring, the 1962 book by Rachel Carson that helped launch the environmental movement.

Whatever one makes of Carr's broader claims about the internet, many readers will be impressed by his summation of recent discoveries in neuroscience. He builds on the work of Nobel-winner Eric Kandel and others to reveal that human brains adapt to new experiences—a feature known as “neuroplasticity.” This is helpful from an evolutionary perspective, but it also means some brain functions atrophy if we don't use them. Here Carr mentions an oft-cited study that found changes in the brain structures of London cab drivers as they began relying on GPS rather than their memories to navigate. He believes that neuroplasticity provides the “missing link” to understanding how the media has “exerted their influence over the development of civilisation and helped to guide, at a biological level, the history of human consciousness.”

This claim is backed up with research on how our brains process information. Some of these findings are disturbing, if predictable: multi-tasking makes us less productive; those reading online skim read; using multimedia to present data may make it harder to grasp, and so on. In particular Carr cites work by Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, who found that the use of modern media “stimulates the brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening older ones.” His experiments showed that just five hours of internet use saw activity in parts of the brain's previously dormant prefrontal cortex—evidence, for Carr, that the internet “rewires” brains.

~ more... ~