What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
June 11th, 2008This one hits very close to home.
Via: The Atlantic:
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Research Credit: idleworm.com
You think you’re discombobulated now, wait until they bring out the brain-scan headset that lets you write and surf telepathically.
HA
I don’t buy into the transhumanist religion. So, no, I won’t be playing along there.
I think one of the most pervasive and subtly damaging lies that’s been fed to humanity throughout modernity is that progress is free, without substantial cost or consequence; or that those costs and consequences can be safely ignored.
Considerations of the costs of “progress”, whether that be universal suffrage, telephony, suburbia, or the Internet, are consistently painted as second-hand to the certain and immense benefits of adoption. That’s not to say that the nay-sayers are always right, but that the careful thought process required to evaluate the costs and benefits of social and technological change is completely side-stepped by the prophets of gleaming chrome wonder; and those prophets are a necessary creation and consequence of commercial and governmental centralization.
Everything has a cost, a consequence; literacy, transportation, medical care, marriage, having children, where you work and how you choose to live. I think part of the vanity that’s specifically expressed by children of the 1960s in the US is that somehow you can retain your full intact self throughout life, never changing, never altered by your own experience, never subject to the whims and caprices of fate. That, compared to historical attitudes of nearly every sane human being who’s previously walked on this planet, is astounding.
That’s part of what really scares me about people like Ray Kurzweil, who, as Kevin says, is an effing lunatic. I listened to Kurzweil get interviewed the other day on Fresh Air, and his arrogance and blindness were astonishing. It’s like the guy has never cracked open a single history book, or he’s completely disconnected from what makes people human.
I’d say, thucydides, that Progress is their religion, and they display all the habits of the worst zealots; which is ironic, as most of them, I’m sure, scoff at religion, per se.
I totally agree that these concerns are valid – however the universe has never operated as a zero-sum game (even though some societies and economies have) and the same is true of the positive feedback loops we call “progress”. (Note: positive here is in the sense of reinforcing effects, not in the sense of “good” – a forest fire is the result of a positive feedback loop).
I think the raw polyanna instinct of Kurzweil isn’t entirely healthy, though it does help augment the message’s spread potential. On the other hand, writing emerging technologies off as the folly of man isn’t very useful either. Emerging trends in interaction, AI, nanotech and biotech are just as great a concern for human freedom, survival and propserty as global governance, finance, and other such issues raised on this blog. Which is why I try to tease these things out. Having a counter-point to my own views is also really useful, and it’s more useful the more specific we get.
Mediums of media are energetic forces of a causal nature. These mediums – human prosthetics – are manifest as they appear to us in material clothing looking like phones, computers, ipods and so on. These forms are in actuality photonic beings or bodies of information that emanate and saturate the mental and emotional environments. These photonic bodies are like waves of pulsating intelligent information, they are akin to packets of information if you will…
Marshall McLuhan understood the biology of media as an interface with universal intelligence, that the medium was not just a material thing but an intelligence unto itself. An intelligence that influenced, worked upon, changed or even possessed human thinking.
Once upon a time in my life, I used to “eat” books. I could read, not skim, entire novels in a day. After my finals one year, I read three books in four days. Big books. But that was before the time I had a sick mother, a garden, other interests etc.
Since becoming immersed in the web, well I can tell you my bottom has become much larger. Seriously, my wanting to know as much as I can on certain topics has caused me to sit more than ever before in my life. I keep hoping to get back to my daily yoga, sewing clothes, reading books, etc. But somehow, the pile of unread books gets larger and larger; I don’t think I need to buy another pair of slacks in my lifetime (unless my butt gets bigger) given the huge pile that awaits my hemming, and, we studied Taylor at Carnegie Mellon and he pissed me off.
I think I resented that Taylor thought he could improve on the human being by machinizing their movements.
I dunno why I am thinking of my Dad a lot these days, maybe memories about when he worked in a slaughterhouse and Herman at Farmlet. But dear old Dad knew our family tended toward addiction.
This was always attributed to the Slovak in us.
In any case, his motto to me was “anything you want to do ( this applied to eating, drinking, etc) do it, but in moderation.”
I have been working to moderation on the Internet. Difficult. Difficult. Difficult.
I actually relish the times when I have to travel and do not have access. But oh, it is becoming to me as sweet an experience as it once was, and still, is to read a good book from start to finish in less than 24.
Learnings is good.;-)
“Marshall McLuhan understood the biology of media as an interface with universal intelligence, that the medium was not just a material thing but an intelligence unto itself. An intelligence that influenced, worked upon, changed or even possessed human thinking.”
Bingo.
Borg or cyborg? Despite the seemingly inevitable rise of the machines and our morbid fear of same, as expressed at the level of cultural reinforcement through mangled and corrupted Hollywood metaphor like the “Matrix” and “Minority Report”, the latter will eventually lead to the former exercising anything less than full individual autonomy. Easier said than done.
I’m no stereotypical Luddite, neo- or otherwise, but if you get down to the actual essence of their argument — that with each step on the long ladder of progress, we sacrifice an old way for a new way with little consideration and often no real clue as to the repercussions — I am a neo-Luddite of the highest order.
The Atlantic article is on point in most respects, and would strike closer to home if I hadn’t been talking about this very thing since early 1994, when I first started sensing and feeling said technological “side effects” myself and began my transition to neo-Luddite.
They’d been there prior, of course, but it wasn’t until they began to manifest in the text realm and I began to “connect the dots” in my mid-to-late twenties that I realized the techno-crush I inherited from my engineer Dad might not be such a healthy thing.
I left the world of hands-on technology as a career very near my thirtieth birthday (1996), and began writing about it instead, by way of finding a compromise that would still pay the bills.
That’s where the rubber met the road for me. By focusing on the creative process often, I try to cultivate the ongoing habit of the written word. I go out of my way to take too long reading texts when I feel the “constricting” sensation in the head that is my brain shifting from standard human impulse to technological warp speed. While I can achieve the necessary effect with an essay or article online, the effect is mitigated as compared to the profound “downshift” felt when moving to the couch with a book or manuscript.
I have always been conscious of the pull on my eyeballs from the illuminated screen, even as a child, which was why I never spent much time attached to the tube (excepting sports), eventually unplugging for good during the period leading up to the arrival of a different level of awareness in 1994.
Today, as a writer/editor type, the Net serves as an expansive research library at my fingertips, as well as a time-sink of even greater magnitude than the slime box standing in the corner. That I spend too much time connected to it via symbolic buttons arrayed across the bottom half of the thing is a given. But like our host, I am also responsible for creating and maintaining a physical space pointing temporally backwards in relation to progress. Today, the shoveling of shit, slaughtering of chickens, stone masonry and learning the multifarious ways of DIY are my lever, with which I attempt to strike a counter-balance with the distributed technological mind.
If there’s any one insight that’s become brutally clear in hindsight, it’s that every assumption we make without consideration will eventually come ’round and bite us on the ass. All that remains to be seen is when, where and how hard.
And for all their “good intentions” (which I suspect are mostly window dressing) we can thank soulless lizards like Kurzweil for keeping the whole mindf**k spinning at ever-increasing velocity.
As long as the cheerleaders of progress are able to keep their operative assumptions prancing across the stage, they maintain the artificially-high threshold for fundamental change that’s manifested in the modern world as a kind of socio-cultural sclerosis, each individual human cell in the vast organism of progress frozen in their solitary temporal world — completely distracted from (but still connected to) the greatest distributed network of all. Life.