nope

Whenever a new and revolutionary information technology appears, naysayers always swarm. Television? Yes. Radio? Check. Newspapers? Right. Gutenberg and his printing press? Absolutely. Scrolls?
Yes, even handwritten manuscripts—the primordial book technology at the foundation of our world culture—had critics. Consider this:

. . . for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

The speaker here is none other than Socrates, as imagined by Plato and translated by Benjamin Jowett. His dialogue Phaedrus <http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html> was written in 360 b.c.e.
Now I have to admit that Socrates . . . er . . . Plato has a point here. I read Phaedrus in an Intro to Philosophy course back when I was in college, but I make no claim to remembering it. I found this quote by typing “Plato worries about books” into Google. Thus, when I casually namecheck two of the greatest philosophers of the ancient world, I fulfill Soc-rates’ prophecy: “. . . they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Wait a minute . . . tiresome?

generational smarts

Of course, I did read Phaedrus once upon a time and I happen to remember who Socrates and Plato were and what they believed—at least in general. So I knew enough to ask the right question to find a citation that makes me look more intelligent than I really am. But perhaps that is the new definition of intelligence in the age of the internet. If one knows the broad outline of human knowledge, then might it not be best to offload the messy details from your memory to Google’s servers, or even to discover them on an as-needed basis?
Welcome to the world of the net evangelists. All kinds of claims have been made about how the children of the net—why not call them the Google Generation?—have an intellectual leg up on their grandparents, the Baby Boomers <babyboomers.com> and their progenitors, the Silent Generation <james rbrett.com/TheSilentGeneration/index.htm>, the Greatest Generation <trinity.edu/mkearl/socpsy01/music/gi%20social %20identity.htm>, and the Lost Generation <home.earthlink.net/~generationwatch/ gw_lostweb.html>. Some argue that the ability of the Google Generation to exploit the multiplicity of tools that the internet provides makes them the first true citizens of the Digital Age. Multitasking gets the jobs done!
The evangelists point to a number of studies to back up their claims that the internet is changing the world for good and forever. Perhaps the most obvious is the Flynn Effect <pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ FLYNNEFF.html>. In 1980, New Zealand political scientist James Flynn published a study comparing IQ test scores for different populations over the past sixty years. Although his results differed from country to country, he documented a generational increase in IQ as measured by standard intelligence tests ranging from three to twenty-five points. While there have been many explanations offered for this puzzling data, one that is often heard is that this Flynn Effect coincides with the advent of our information-rich media culture, of which the internet is the latest and most important iteration. Just last year, the always thought-provoking Pew Internet and American Life Project <pewinternet.org> conducted a survey of 895 technology stakeholders and critics. These experts were asked to predict the Future of the Internet <pewinternet. org/Reports/2010/Future-of-the-Internet-IV/Part-1Google.aspx?r=1>. Almost three quarters of those polled agreed with the statement “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices.” Sixty-five percent agreed with this statement: “. . . by 2020 it will be clear that the Internet has enhanced and improved reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge.”
As I type this, one of the best known net evangelists has a new book out that describes the coming digital age. In 2008 Clay Shirky <shirky.com> (hey Clay, how about an update?) published the influential Here Comes Everybody <my mindonbooks.com/?p=541>, in which he discussed how the revolution in social networking will change the way we live. He writes, “We now have communications tools which are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are now witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change.” One of his insights that I particularly like is something that SF writers have known all along. “Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn’t create change: it has to have been round long enough that most of society is using it.” While an invention story may glitter at first, it is the extrapolation of the impact of that invention that is the guiding light of SF.
Now comes Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus <wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ ff_pink_shirky>, in which he makes the case that as we wean ourselves away from the passivity of the TV media environment to the interactivity of the net, society as a whole will gain a kind of cognitive surplus. And since we now have the tools of social networking, we will be able to bring more of our collective brain power to bear on creativity, problem-solving, and social change. You can watch Shirky make a wry and ingenious analogy between the social impacts of gin and tee-vee in the keynote address <youtube. com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ> he gave at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2008. A lot of what he says makes sense to me.

or not

A lot of what Clay Shirky says also makes sense to one Nicolas Carr <rough type.com>, and it scares him. A lot. It was perhaps poetic justice that Carr’s new book, The Shallows <theshallowsbook. com/nicholascarr/The_Shallows.html>, came out simultaneously with Cognitive Surplus. It provides a welcome check to Shirky’s unbridled enthusiasm for the cyber-revolution. You might remember Carr from his notorious 2008 polemic in the Atlantic “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” <theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868>. With this piece, Carr stuck a stick into the digital hornet’s nest; the angry buzzing continues unabated with the publication of his new book. Here he expands on his argument and cites, chapter and verse, research that indicates that the internet is having a profound effect not only on our culture, but also on the very structure of our brains.
To understand Carr’s thesis we need to see how our view of the brain has changed over time. When you were in school, you were probably taught that the adult brain was pretty much immutable. All the growth and change it was capable of supposedly happened during your childhood. By time you were a teen, your brain had assumed the form it would keep for the rest of your life—hardened like concrete, as it were. The only change possible was degenerative; you would gradually lose mental capacity as you aged.
But in the 1970s, the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich <merzenich.posit science.com/?page_id=145> began a series of historic experiments on monkeys that seemed to indicate that primate brains remained plastic throughout adulthood—plastic as in capable of profound change. First he created detailed maps of the monkeys’ brains. Then he began to isolate nerves to see how their brains would react. When he amputated one of the monkey’s fingers, the brain map for that finger disappeared over time and the maps for the adjacent fingers grew into its space. He also bound two of the monkey’s fingers together. After several months of using the two fingers as one, the maps of the individual fingers merged into one. Merzenich’s findings were later tested on humans: when people with webbed fingers had them surgically separated, two distinct maps developed for the newly separated fingers. But brain plasticity doesn’t only arise from trauma: Merzenich found that the brain maps of monkeys’ faces changed every few weeks. When he first began publishing, his findings were scorned by mainstream science. “I received hostile treatment,” he said. “. . . It was as if I just made it up.” In the years since, however, Merzenich has been vindicated and the ability of the adult human brain to reorganize itself has been well documented.
Which brings us—briefly—back to Carr; we’ll give him his due in the next installment. But the crux of his argument is this: “. . . if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the internet.” While I do not necessarily agree with all of his reservations about this state of affairs, I believe that he has a point when he writes, “the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use . . . since the book.”

exit

And here is where we return to the heartland of our genre. Because isn’t this what the cyberpunks were going on about back in the eighties before there was a world wide web? Remember that those were early days, before the Mac, before mice or hard disks. Windows had not yet opened and MS-DOS ruled the earth. When William Gibson published Neuromancer <wsu.edu/~brians/science_  fiction/neuromancer.html>, there were just over a thousand internet hosts.
Like all savvy sf writers, the cyberpunks skipped the invention stories and went right to the impact of technology stories. To them cyberspace was not just a literary conceit or a collection of cool gadgets; it was a new way of thinking and living. Was anyone surprised when Timothy Leary <leary.com> became one of the first public figures not closely associated with science fiction to hail the coming of cyberpunk? Leary once said that the internet was the LSD of the nineties. A clever aphorism, but it doesn’t go quite far enough, since the effects of acid on the brain are fleeting, whereas the effects of the internet can potentially last a lifetime.
But imagine the famous commercial recast: This is your brain. This is your brain on Facebook.
Any questions?

Copyright © 2010 James Patrick Kelly