This morning I listened to a program on CBC Radio that piqued my interest – the piece was titled, “Is the Internet making us stupid?”. It featured an interview with Nick Carr, who discussed his article last year in Atlantic Monthly called “Is Google making us stupid?” . Carr argues that the Internet is great for delivering short, quick, snippets of information that appeal to a basic biological need to constantly moniter our environment for novelty and pay attention to new bits of information. His explanation for this biological need was adaptive – essentially, this need has been hardwired into us through natural selection in response to the need ancestrals humans had to make quick, often life-or-death decisions in the face of environmental adversity.
Carr goes on to suggest that the kind of quick scanning for information we do when searching and reading on the Internet is actually changing the way we process information neurologically. He points to anecdotal reports from himself and others who no longer feel able to sit and read, to concentrate, to lose themselves, or become immersed for lengthy periods of time. Carr fears that these abilities, if not exercised, will be lost.
So much of what we need and want now exists on the net: writing, reading, calendar-keeping, journalling, entertainment, communicating, networking, buying, selling, sex, gambling . . . . and more. Carr argues that we use our computers to do all of these things all of the time – simultaneously. This division of attention, focus, and concentration, he believes, is reshaping us neurologically. It’s creating brains that are perfectly designed for twitter.
Wether or not Carr’s fear are well-founded will be addressed by cognitive scientists. Let’s hope they have the attention span to find out the answers.
