Internet of Change: How the Internet Changed our Thinking
“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, […] but because the way I THINK has changed?” (Scott Karp)
Within the following essay, I want to discuss Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google making us stupid” with the focus on the change of our thinking through the internet. The internet, as a revolutionary medium, has made a huge change in our society. Forget about the internet of things and think about it as “The Internet of Change” and how it changed our thinking.
While reading Carr’s essay, I agreed a lot with his arguments about the change of our reading. To explain this briefly, I do read a lot as a student, because my courses are covered by literature. While reading, I constantly realize my impatience — like kids asking a hundred times “Have we arrived yet?” — I keep asking myself “How much reading do I have left?”. I start counting pages impatiently. It’s hard for me to focus my attention on reading for a longer period. I realized, that even if I’m interested in a subject, reading over 25 pages all in one is exhausting. But when I have to read for example 5 shorter texts, which can be summed up to this extent, it doesn’t feel that hard anymore. I experience this “good feeling” about myself when I finish reading a text. Then I can finally treat myself, doing something else before starting to do the next thing, like checking my phone. This can somehow also be implemented into the discussion of our seeking for multiple information in shorter time range. Instead of knowing only one thing profoundly, we want to know several things very general and superficially. We prefer reading several small texts rather than one large one. Somehow my thinking and feeling about reading changed, I can’t remember when and if it is caused by digital media and the internet. But I do realize, that somehow it is my demand to check my phone, which is making my reading less efficient then it was before I had Instagram, Facebook and co. However, my experiences strongly resemble those of Nicholas Carr. Even if he’s an author and loves reading, he experienced a change in his reading behaviour and that it might be affected by digital devices.
Scott Karp tries to explain this problem with a change from linear thinking to networked thinking. He says:
“Google can find relevant content on the web because it doesn’t “think” in a linear fashion — it takes all of our thoughts, as expressed in links, and looks at them as a network. If you could follow Google’s algorithm in real time, it would seem utterly chaotic, but the result is extremely coherent.” (Scott Karp, 2008)
Maybe humans just adapt to that trend, because Google works more efficient in this networked, chaotic way then we do in our linear way. Therefore, we try to be more like Google. This can also be explained in the way we look things up in the internet. It’s not that we search for an article and Google shows us one result. Most of the time when we are looking up for things we get offered thousands of search results. And if we would only click for one, maybe we would miss out a better one. We start to open several web pages, which we think could provide us the information we are looking for and look through them quickly. This made a change from deep thinking into fast thinking and as Carr also says it makes us skimming information. We prefer to collect a lot of information quickly and superficially in order to have a general idea about a topic rather than to deal with things. This goes along with the argument of Daniel Hillis. He describes a shift in our world which leads us to know more because we are expected to know more. And because we are so busy all the time, we don’t have time to know things more intensively and professionally, but we have the ability to know a lot of things just to a minimum extent. So, we can be part of society, participating in discussions about themes, which are declared as important in general, even if for ourselves it does not seem to be that important. It is also about our growing responsibility for the future. All decisions that are made nowadays are influenced by decisions of individuals. This is what democracy gave us. Higher responsibility and therefore higher pressure to know a higher number of things, to be part of the world, to fit in.
But is Google making us “stupid”? As already mentioned, Google is giving us an “unlimited” amount of Information for every question we have. Unlimited in brackets, because we don’t know what infinity is — we never experienced it. But as Google offers a huge amount which no one could count or even know by themselves let’s call it unlimited. Einstein once said:
“The difference between genius and stupidity is, genius has its limits”. (Albert Einstein)
Google challenges this statement, because one could say that Google is a form of genius — it knows the most — and this knowledge, which is striving into infinity, therefore has no limit. But how can we differentiate stupidity from genius under this perception?
When Nicholas Carr chose the title for his essay, he tried to provoke the reader to read his text. Nearly everyone would disagree that Google makes us stupid — because, well, it gives us universal knowledge about nearly everything we want to know. If we want to know something, we ask Google. That’s exactly what Carr tries to say, Google makes our lives easier, because we get an endless supply of information for every question. Maybe we are not getting stupid, in contrary, our knowledge expands. But we get lazier looking up things and think critically about arguments, we believe so much on what we read on the web, we even start to cite more Internet references instead of books. The value of trust for information has therefore changed.
Once again, it’s a change of our thinking, because instead of questioning topics and reflect what we think about a topic by ourselves — like for example in politics — we just look up opinions in the internet and adapt to them if we somehow agree. Can we really agree to everything we read or do we just agree with those things because we don’t know any better? Discussions are more referred about things people read in the internet, sometimes newspapers, but the very own opinion goes lost. It seems as if we trust secondary resources more than our own minds.
Under these aspects, I wouldn’t completely agree that the phrase that the internet makes us stupid fully matches the ongoing cultural situation. But it definitely changed our culture and how we think things through. However, I do agree a lot with Hillis argument: we are expected to know more, therefore we seek for more information but under our constant pressure of doing a lot of things in a short time, we lose time and therefore our ability to think about things in a deep way. We are not stupid, we are just afraid of this responsibility and somehow don’t know how to handle this amount of knowledge.
Even in the 1960’s Marshall McLuhan talked about how media, which supplies information, changes the process of thought. In his book, “Understanding Media” he’s claiming that the medium itself influences how the message is perceived. Concurrent with our thinking also our behavior has changed. In Sherry Turkle’s book “Reclaiming Conversation — The power of talk in a digital age”, she talks about the change of having conversations and the loss of empathy through digital media. Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share feelings with one another” (Oxford Dictionary, 2017) and counts as an ability only humans possess. We are constantly online and tend to be afraid of being alone and bored. Every time we don’t know what to do we look at our phones. Even when talking to people, we look at our phones. It is the fear of missing out, so we try to do several things at the same time, to be the most efficient with our time, because we are so stressed and need to do multiple things at once. This generational shift, which Turkle discusses, happened with the integration of the internet. So, through this argument it is pointed out, that the internet not only changes our thinking and behavior, it is depriving us of the traits and abilities that make us human.
Susan Greenfield, a British neurobiologist, experiences a change of our mind as well. She points out, that the environment has changed, and that our brains which adapt to the environment, did too.
“firstly, the human brain adapts to the environment; secondly, the environment is changing in an unprecedented way; so thirdly, the brain may also be changing in an unprecedented way.” (Robbins, 2014)
The initiation of the internet changed the environment. First it introduced us to the digital environment and second it gave us 24/7 service wherever and whenever we want. Under this statement there is once again the theory of a change of our brains, with whom we do think, so it’s also a change of our thinking.
There are a lot of people discussing the change of our thinking through the internet. Even though this discussion has been going on for some time, it has become more important today than ever before. We are constantly introducing new technologies. Innovation is the key to power and has the highest impact in the world. Our world gets fully digitalized. In the following decades, we are going through changes by the introduction and use of Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things. These will again cause a decrease in deep thinking and our ability for empathy and all those negative side effects which can happen. But in my opinion it is up to us, how far we let these things go. We create those devices and we are integrating them into our lives — therefore we are the only ones which can make this stop. We should stop complaining about things going too far, and take the responsibility for not letting them go too far. Just like “Guns don’t kill people, people do” it’s not the technology or the internet that changes our thinking, it’s us.
Reading is important because it makes us critical, curious and helps us understanding things from different perspectives. Through the internet, we have a huge audience and can reach more people, so let’s take a use of this capability and talk to the world about those problems. We don’t need to criticize the medium with which we are reading now, but we need to design a new way of reading. When people realize that others don’t read their whole text, skim them by yourself and point out the important things which you would like people to know. Allow a function which reads aloud your texts to the audience. We need to start being creative and face those problems not by complaining about and recognize them, but by accepting and adapt to them.
As Hillis says, we have more responsibility, because we can decide how things should go, so we need to make a use of this and try to point out and focus on the important things in our lives. My personal experience from the discussions we made in the course was, thinking about things more critically and more conscious and deal with the subject. The awareness of the problem should be introduced with a larger focus to education systems. Instead of teaching kids how to use technology, teach them about its side effects. The brain adapts to the environment, so create an environment which adapts to those changes properly and usefully. It’s not only about facing the problems. It’s about accepting them to get us one step closer to change them. We don’t need to get rid of technology itself but from our wrong way of using it. We experience a change of our thinking but forget to make it a good change of thinking. The internet is what we made of it — if we don’t like it, it’s our turn to redefine it.