Gerald Lappay
RWS 100
Professor Werry
December 12, 2014
Unit 4: Final
Draft
Many
have claimed that the internet has affected our minds in some manner. Unlike
drugs and alcohol, the internet has arguably shaped the way we think, read and
write – for better or for worse. This connection between the internet and our
brains has been quite the topic of discussion. From writers, to doctors, and
even the occasional late-night television show host; all have their own views
on the same subject. But what has the internet done to us – more importantly
the people who grow up with this kind of technology? In this essay I will
briefly analyze the arguments of Nicholas Carr and Clive Thompson, two
particular writers who have very different and nearly contrasting opinions
about the internet’s effects on cognitive function; as well as summarize a PBS
video covering the same topic. Albeit the views presented in the video are
quite neutral in comparison to Carr and Thompson’s views. I will then include
my own views on the matter, ultimately concluding with my verdict on whether or
not the internet is a positive or negative influence on people today.
If
Clive Thompson (who I will go on about later), author of “Smarter Than You
Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an
internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, writer of The Atlantic Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” can be
considered an internet skeptic. Carr criticizes the internet for its harmful
effects on cognitive function. He points out nuances in our reading and writing
that may have occurred through frequent use of the internet. Armed with
metaphors and other rhetorical strategies, Carr supports his argument through
personal accounts, examples from past the past (with introduced technology akin
to the internet), and studies performed by those in higher-education. For
example, Carr introduces the reader to Maryanne Wolf, who is also an internet
skeptic of sorts. Wolf, a psychologist at Tufts University, claims that our
reading is the most impacted due to the internet.
Wolf
worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts
“efficiency” and “immediacy” above all
else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier
technology, the printing press, made long and complex
works of prose commonplace. (Carr)
By introducing the idea that our reading could be affected
by the internet, Carr quotes an account by blogger Bruce Friedman, who claims
his mental habits have changed because of the internet. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost
the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs
is too much to absorb. I skim it,” (Carr). Carr continues this idea of skimming
through pulling data from a study done at University College London. The study
observed the habits performed by visitors on research-based websites. What they
discovered is similar to Friedman’s description of skimming.
They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form
of skimming activity,” hopping from one
source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two
pages of an article or book before they would
“bounce” out to another site. (Carr)
Wolf’s claims, Friedman’s
testimony, and University College London’s study all seem to strengthen Carr’s
argument; but let’s take a look another writer whose claims go against the
grain in comparison to Carr’s.
Clive Thompson is a Canadian writer whose works have
appeared on The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Wired,
and other famous publications. His work relates technology and its social and
developmental impacts. Unlike Carr, Thompson sees the internet in a
[predominantly] positive light. He claims that our prolific use of the internet
has improved our ability to write, read, and discuss – almost to the degree of
the ancient Greeks; who were known to be the grandmasters of discussion. In his
book, “Smarter than You Think”, Thompson identifies Ory Okolloh as an example
of this, whose active blogging on the Kenyan presidential election in 2007 took
the internet by storm. By covering the election, Okolloh was able to create a
sort of news feed for other Kenyans under the great media blackout during the
election. Non-Kenyans also took notice to this, and soon they created a great
deal of attention to Okolloh and the supposedly corrupt election. By blogging,
Okolloh was able to generate a large amount of attention, and most importantly:
a large amount of writing. “A documentary team showed up to interview Okolloh
for a film they were producing about female bloggers. They’d printed up all her
blog posts on paper … it was the size of two telephone books” (Carr). And arguably, it was good writing. It must
have been good if it gathered that much attention.
But Thompson takes his argument and brings it into a whole
new direction. What makes the internet such a good thing, according to
Thompson, is the idea that by using the internet, you are expressing your
thoughts publicly – something Thompson dubs “public thinking”. And arguably,
that’s what the internet ends up being; a whole lot of public thinking. “How
much writing is that, precisely? Well, doing an extraordinarily crude back-of-the-napkin
calculation, and sticking only to e-mail and utterances in social media, I
calculate that we're composing at least 3.6 trillion words daily or the
equivalent of 36 million books every day. The entire U.S. Library of Congress,
by comparison, holds around about 35 million books” (Thompson).
But what good comes out of public thinking? Thompson pulls
data from a study performed by Vanderbilt University in 2008. The study took
three groups of children, each given the same puzzle to complete. The first
group of children performed the puzzle silently. The second group was given a
tape recorder to talk into. The third group of children had their mothers in
the same room, listening but not giving any advice.
The results? The children who solved the puzzles silently
did worst of all. The ones who talked into a tape recorder did better the mere
act of articulating their thinking process aloud
helped them think more critically and identify the patterns more clearly. But
the ones who were talking to a
meaningful audience – mom did best of all. When presented with the more complicated puzzles, on average
they solved more than the kids who'd talked
to themselves and about twice as many as the ones who worked silently. (Thompson)
With this evidence, Thompson seeks to prove that there is a
positive connection between publicly articulating thoughts and cognitive
function. Since he also claims that the internet is another way to publicly
articulate thought (just on a larger, diverse scale), the internet has a
positive connection with cognitive function.
While I do
recognize the small nuances Carr points out in my daily life, they’re too
negligible for me to think twice (or even care) about. It’s not because my
brain just went and became a supercomputer for a spaceship, ultimately to be
de-wired and broken by some external force. It’s simply because I’m not
interested in what’s presented to me. To address Maryanne Wolf and University
College London, skimming is not “all bad”. You don’t read a whole text
front-to-back if you’re only looking for a specific bit of information. That’s
what skimming is for. You isolate a passage, find what you need, cite it, and
move onto the next passage. And while it does focus on “efficiency” and
“immediacy”, for the most part I believe the subjects of your research ended up
being students who need to get a term paper done. If someone finds a text
genuinely interesting, of course they’ll read it from cover to cover – provided
they have the time to do so. If they need it for a term paper, well, the paper
isn’t going to be finished by the time you finish the text. As for Thompson, he
is absolutely correct about the internet opening up so much opportunity for
writing. He’s also correct in saying that such writing has the potential to be
absolute crap.
As a
millennial, which is what seems to be what the media dubs the generation I grew
up in. my feelings are a bit mixed. There is a vast amount of writing that can
be found on the internet. Some works are good; some are bad, and some are just
downright awful erotica. It’s possible to find equal amounts of these on the
internet with the right searching tools. And I think the “right searching
tools” are what the internet needs right now. Take the automobile in its early
phases. When it was easy to obtain one, everyone didn’t know how to operate
them around others. Then there were a lot of accidents. The automobile remained
intact, but not so much the operator. Then people decided to employ rules and
regulations – ultimately making driving both a good yet integral part of our
lives.
The
internet needs those rules and regulations. But they don’t have to be handled
by the government. Take what happened to the Stop Online Piracy Act – the
government tried to step in the internet’s business and everyone went mad. With
each passing year, the internet seems to get closer and closer to being an
integral part of our lives, just like the automobile. How we finally get to
that point, is still unclear to me – and possibly to Carr, Thompson and other
writers.
But we can
draw inspiration from what’s trending on the internet now. An example (which is
the one I connect with the most, and therefore talk about the most) is the
popular website, reddit.com. “If Google is where you go to search for things,
then reddit is where you go to see things people have found. They also have
subreddits, and each subreddit works just like the main page: an updating list
of interesting stuff according to the people interested in that stuff” (CGP
Grey). To summarize reddit, people find things for other people to discover and
comment upon. And it seems like it does a fine job of creating positive
discussion, like what Thompson thinks the internet is (and should be). But why
is this? If you recall the age-old saying “great minds think alike”, that’s
what reddit basically is: minds with the same interests, discussing about
what’s interesting to them. In the event there’s an “un-like mind” with differing
interests, chances are they’re often ignored or sent somewhere else to where
they do find someone with the same interests! Everyone’s bound to have the same
interests, and a quick internet search for them is probably your best bet. This
isn’t a perfect rebuttal, but this is typically what happens in today’s society
(when it comes to the internet). In summary, what the internet needs is a
centralized way of finding what you need, and share your thoughts on it. We’ve
come very close to it, but it’s not exactly perfect. Once we reach that point,
the internet will be a place where writing and reading can reach a whole new
level.
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