This Is Your Brain on the Internet
The estimable Kevin Drum thinks I’m wrong about the way the web teaches us to think:
I find this an enormously appealing argument. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any evidence at all to suggest it’s true. Understanding “broader categories” — the context into which individual pieces of knowledge fit — requires you to read books. Full stop. Maybe someday it won’t, but it does now.
…I’d love to be wrong about this. But I’m not. If you want to understand the world, not just collect endless factlets, you still need to read books. If you do, the internet makes you smarter. If you don’t, it makes you dumber.
Drum’s right — but I think I may not have been clear about what I meant. My point wasn’t that people will cease to read books, but rather that it will reshape how we recall the information we gather from them (and other information sources). So, rather than become repositories of detailed knowledge about our favorite subjects — baseball, film, health-care policy, presidential history — able to spout trivia on command, we’ll become indexes of what’s known. You won’t memorize charts and tables, dates and locations, names and details, or even the finer points of various arguments and interpretations. But you’ll know where to find the details if you need them. Like an index! There just won’t be as much need for anyone to personally master all the details in order to be conversant in their field of expertise. In turn, your knowledge-base will be broader, more connected. It’s a trade-off — comprehensive knowledge of a limited number of subjects on one hand vs. shallower-but-wider understanding on the other. Know less, have access to more.
This is a good reminder of how not to be a dumber on the internet!
— Sangaroon · May 13, 12:42 PM · #
I think blogs serve as an example of this behavioral trend. What’s the structure of the prototypical blog entry?
1. Insert quick blurb of background information including a couple links not necessarily requiring click-through
2. Provide small quotation from one of aforementioned references for readers too frenetic to click through
3. Provide opinion on the above quote/link
4. Keep it short.
People come to blogs for current events, and for the opinions of the authors of the blog. I can’t tell you how many times a day I say “I read on Megan” or “I read on Yglesias”… Blogs have become, in some cases, the heavily filtered sources of information for internet users. And blogs are set up precisely to be a short enough entry to hold your attention. Why read a whole book about the Iraq War when I can get a running narrative of it on blogs…and all I have to remember is the blog author’s name, and a few keywords from the entry and Google will find if for me later if I need it. Suddenly I’m a few clicks away from being an expert on everything, rather than just an eccentric, well-read expert on one thing.
— Alex · May 13, 01:31 PM · #
A pretty good book on this subject (IMHO) is “Everything Bad is Good For You,” by Steven Johnson. He makes the argument that pop culture is, in general, becoming more challenging, and that specific niche areas (i.e. video games) are forcing us to flex our mental muscle in different ways, which is leading to an increased intelligence. But I think the argument that variety in these various domains leads to the best result is probably accurate.
— Jeremiah · May 13, 11:53 PM · #
But Johnson’s book gets things precisely wrong.
— Stuart Buck · May 14, 04:44 PM · #