Our Changing Society

Douglas Deutsch

Our Changing Society

In discussions about the internet, there is a lot of controversy over the consequences of society’s increased digital use on our brain. One particularly polarized area of this argument is how the architecture of the internet is affecting our brains compared to print and oral communication. The most commonly held opinion is that the internet is causing our minds to atrophy, as supported in Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is google making us stupid.” However, the main opposition to this hypothesis contends that the new technology merely transforms the way we read and write, rather than destroying it, as explained in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay “Reading (and writing) online, rather than on the decline.” My own view is that the internet produces some previously inconceivable benefits, but it is, at the very roots, changing how our minds work.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that the “utopian past in which everyone reads serious literature … was vastly overblown,” and to an extent this is true. However, she fails to take into account how the internet allows for large quantities of literary garbage (think most social media and clickbait). In fact, it can often be difficult to find the few relevant pieces of information among the sea of clutter that is the internet. The process of creating a book is an involved and risky venture, one that pointedly lacks the instant publishing of the internet. This leads to more consistent quality, but less diversity in literature. However, Fitzpatrick hits home on her point that the internet allows for community in the academic world that was previously unimaginable. The internet is invaluable when it comes to bringing diversity of thought into academic conversations. It opens up the academic world to anyone with internet access. For example, over the summer I grew curious about cognitive psychology, read several scholarly articles about some interesting case studies, and through that was introduced to the emerging field of neuroeconomics. The internet brings accessibility and community, something that has an enormously positive impact on the world.

Nicholas Carr, on the other hand, asserts that reading on the web is fracturing our ability to concentrate and have deep thought. He first supports his claim by explaining the structure of the internet and the way it provides a distorted, non-linear way of thinking. He then backs up his claim through expert opinion on the neurology of the brain. I completely agree with this point. If you noticed in my previous example, I grew interested in psychology, read a little about that, but was then drawn towards a different subject. This is described in Carr’s essay as “power brows[ing] horizontally through titles” and it is not conductive to deep reading and thinking. However, Carr misses the mark when he assumes that the way our brains are changing is a downgrade. He compares the changes in the brain to a loss of humanity. This is a pointless comparison because we as humans have yet to accurately define what it means to “exist” anyways. A bird may look down upon a worm as something inferior, but it cannot fathom anything smarter than it is, just as we cannot fully conceptualize a shift, for better or for worse, in our consciousness. Furthermore, by relating his argument to this out of proportion fear, Carr is decreasing the ethos and logos of his argument.

I believe that the web has a substantial impact on our brains. It some immediately obvious negative effects, with ambiguous consequences in the future, but I do not believe this warrants a fear or aversion to the internet. The community and collaboration that the internet brings needs to be taken into just as much consideration as our fractured attention spans when discussing the internets effect on the brain. Technology and human society are evolving together as they always have been and always will. This can be seen everywhere because technology permeates our lives. Even in the world of academia, research and discovery has shifted away from the lone genius unraveling the world’s mysteries to a global collaboration of the brightest minds all working together on the same problems. The internet reflects this shift in society just as society is reflecting this shift in the technology of the internet. A society is defined by the technology that allows it to be, so whether this latest evolution in society is something to fear is up for the individual to decide, but it is happening either way.

Honor Pledge: DD

Sources:

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, The Atlantic, July 2008, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/. Accessed 9 Sept. 2019.

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Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Reading (and Writing) Online, Rather Than on the Decline.” Profession, vol. 2012, no. 1, Dec. 2012, pp. 41–52, 10.1632/prof.2012.2012.1.41. Accessed 6 Mar. 2019.