Socrates would have much to say about the Internet if he
were alive today—and he would not be complimentary.
In his own time, Socrates was distressed by the increasing
use of writing in the place of bardic recitation, oral discourse and
philosophical dialog. That may be
why we have no writings directly from him. We know of his concern only through Plato, in whose Phaedrus we find Socrates recounting objections by mythological Egyptian god-king Thamus to the gift
of writing: "[It] 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; … they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know
nothing."
A reincarnated Socrates would no doubt have the same
reaction to the Internet. He might
paraphrase Thamus by saying, "The Internet will create forgetfulness in
its users, because they will not use their own memories; they will trust external
websites and not remember of themselves; they will acquire broad knowledge but
it will be shallow."
Neurologically speaking, Socrates would be onto
something. Modern research has
shown that neuronal circuits in the brain, including its memory, wax and wane
in response to demands placed on them.
For example, would-be London cabbies are required to memorize the location
of every street and landmark within six miles of Charing Cross and the best
routes among them. As they train
to meet this requirement, their brains' posterior hippocampi—which store
spatial representations and navigation information—get bigger. After a cabbie's
retirement, the hippocampus returns to normal size.
Persistent use of the Internet might be causing similar
brain changes. Recent studies show
that people who heavily multitask and hyperlink find prolonged concentration
difficult. They are much more easily distracted by irrelevant environmental
stimuli. They tend to have less
control over working memory—the temporary memory involved in ongoing
information processing, which is sensitive to interruptions. They have more difficulty in the
formation and retention of both short- and long-term memories.
It would seem from these observations that neuronal circuits
such as long-term memory, which depends on intense and repeated concentration
to thrive, are being weakened in chronic Internet users, and circuits involved
in rapid scanning, skimming and multitasking are being strengthened. This is an atavism of a sort, a throwback
to the days of cave people, who may not have been deep thinkers but were
supremely alert to sudden events like motion in the peripheral vision that
might warn of a predator. Today's
sudden events consist of arriving email and texts, hyperlinks, and the like,
which deflect us from current tasks onto others.
These topics and many more are discussed in a fascinating
book by Nicholas Carr,
The
Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr's
main thesis is that today's Internet-dominated activities are indeed causing
our brains to rewire themselves.
He aptly quotes the Jesuit priest and media scholar John Culkin: "We
shape our tools and thereafter they shape us." Carr notes that it has ever been thus, from the writing that
so worried Socrates, through the map, the clock, the compass, and so on to
modern times. Each new tool has
broadened our ability to understand and control our surroundings, but each has
exacted penalties in the form of loss of previous skills and the societal
attributes that they underpinned.
The balance of benefits and costs of an new tool is not
always apparent at the start. It
turns out that the original Socrates was wrong to worry that writing would be preponderantly
harmful: the forgetfulness he feared did not occur. Rather,
at least until multitasking recently came into play, book-reading forced us to
concentrate deeply and linearly, actually enhancing our abilities both to stay
with a single task and to commit the knowledge we thus gained to long-term
memory. On the other hand, our
modern-day Socrates might turn out to be right about the detriments of the
Internet. It does appear to be
driving us in the opposite direction, toward spasmodic, superficial scattering
of our attention; outsourcing our memory to the Web; and a possible
intellectual destiny in "the shallows" of Carr's title.
The counterbalancing upside of the Internet is of course
substantial: the ease and efficiency with which so many workaday tasks can now
be done. The balance between benefit and detriment will take a long time to
become clear. I suggested in the
most recent of my several previous postings concerning the Internet—click on
"Internet" in the index to the right to see those postings—that a
final assessment might require a century or two to achieve.
(Did you deflect your attention to the index? Did you click on the suggested
hyperlink and peruse those previous postings? Even if you did neither, did your working memory fail to
maintain the first part of the sentence in mind during the interruption,
forcing you to read it again? Voila! The
world of online reading.)
I have two reasons for contending that it will take
generations or centuries to fully assess the impact of the Internet. First, Internet Age technologies are
still unfolding in a now unknown way, with unknown consequences. Second, the brain will likely show
itself more malleable in adapting to the Internet's demands than Carr and
others credit. There is already
evidence that the working memories of heavy multitaskers are expanding in order
to retain temporary information on several tasks simultaneously. Further, the brains of those raised on
the Internet are still engaged in their initial wiring, which won't be finished until they are 25 years old, say 2020
for the earliest Web babies. That
generation and its successors will probably end up wired much more effectively
for life in the Internet Age than their elders like Carr, whose brains must be rewired helter-skelter from earlier configurations, which
they might not want to surrender.
(There's even an evolutionary implication here, which I am not
addressing, for then we would be talking of waiting millennia for a verdict,
not merely generations or centuries.)
Then, will our latter-day Socrates be as wrong about the
Internet as the original Socrates was about writing? We can't know yet.
Patience is the name of the game.