The Internet Revisited

  This year I have been curiously mute about the impact on our lives of the Internet and information technology more generally.  Last year, on the other hand, I was obsessed with the subject, publishing no fewer than seven postings about it.  I tended to be mostly negative, despite all the undisputed benefits the web places at our fingertips. 

  For example, I joined MIT professor Sherry Turkle in being disturbed by the "alone together" syndrome, epitomized by groups of people staring at their smartphones and tablets rather than engaging face to face with each other—a modern preference to communicate by texting or tweeting rather than by physical presence [1].  With writer Nicholas Carr, I wondered what the Internet is doing to the wiring of our brains—whether our constant multitasking is making it harder for us to think linearly, as we do when we concentrate on reading a book [2].   With New York Times columnist David Brooks, I worried that online learning will diminish the passionate, interactive experience that education should be [3].  And with Columbia professor Tim Wu, I tried to parse the Internet forces that could constrain rather than hugely multiply the availability of information [4].

  Now comes a book that is almost unequivocally positive: Clive Thompson's Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better.  His motif is stated plainly at the outset: "If this book accentuates the positive, that's in part because we've been so flooded with apocalyptic warnings of late."  Indeed, the very apocalypses of others are boons to him.  Thompson has morphed the original Apocalypse's nefarious four horsemen into three very unapocalyptic Internet virtues: 

• Memory Augmentation: We supplement our brain's memory using personal electronic devices and the Internet's huge data banks, thus freeing us from the chore of memorization so we can do more "human" things: intuit, invent, conduct relationships. 

• Focusing our thoughts:  We all are now writing far more than most of our forebears by incessantly blogging (mea culpa!), emailing, texting, IM'ing, tweeting, etc.  In thus writing down our ideas, we feel forced to hone them more precisely than we would if merely thinking or mouthing them. 

• Networking:  Through our constant online interaction, particularly in social networking, we have developed an "ESP-like 'ambient awareness' … of what others are doing and thinking," which expands our ability to understand people we care about and to dispel "pluralistic ignorance" of people at a distance from us.  Networking also makes us more collaborative.

  Thompson's initial chapter, "The Rise of the Centaurs," illustrates the first of these virtues—memory augmentation—by using the example of chess.  Technology makes it possible for the best computers to beat the best chess masters, because computers can quickly explore every possible chain of moves seven or more deep in the light of a huge memorized archive of classical strategies, and choose the best next move, which can beat a mere human's intuitive understanding of the state of play.  But Thompson points out that even moderately good chess players augmented by modest computers can beat either the best chess master or the most powerful computer playing alone.  That is, a "centaur" combining the human brain with a computer's memory and speed trumps all. 

  That's the main theme of the book: humans will progress by delegating functions like memory and calculation to machines, while reserving human, un-machinelike capabilities to themselves—a complementary hybrid of organic and silicon chemistry.  My son likes to think of this in sci-fi terms: as a stage of evolution of Homo sapiens.  Many foresee the next step as direct electrical connections between the brain and the machine.  Rudimentary links of this type have already been fashioned to control artificial limbs—cyborgs rather than centaurs, so to speak—but so far not to memory augmentation.

  I myself can attest to the second virtue—focusing our thoughts.  In the past twenty months I have written almost 100,000 words on this blog, a rate of composition that astonishes even a retired academic like me.  The process has forced me to turn inchoate thoughts on a large variety of subjects into what I hope are well-structured arguments and sentiments worthy of being read.  Every paragraph—indeed, every word—I write is examined and re-examined until it expresses the meaning and nuance I intend.  Thompson claims that, despite the Internet Age's sometimes regrettable outpouring of badly composed screeds, my experience is the more common; people in general are taking added care in polishing their writings to a fine sheen.  Further, he contends that increased literacy with the written word has led to adroitness in other media when words alone won't do, e.g., video commentaries on such sites as YouTube.  Activity like this by ordinary people, when broadcasted, has broken the stranglehold the powerful have traditionally had on public speech.

  The impact of the third virtue—networking—is even more dramatic, says Thompson.  First, people are constantly electronically telling each other of their doings, however trivial (to the point where I wonder how they have any time for other daily pursuits). Thompson asserts that this activity serves to create an invaluable "ambient awareness" that binds society together and replaces the less spontaneous and less efficient water-cooler and coffee-klatsch chit-chat of yesteryear.  Second, on-line collaboration in projects such as Wikipedia has shown that placing our knowledge on the web has a more personal quality than just storing cold facts.  The so-called wisdom of crowds comes into play, in which many small, independent and interactive contributions to a project can lead to faster and more accurate solutions of problems.

  A brave new world in the offing?  We'll see.  Even Thompson worries that outsourcing memory to machines might impair the Eureka! moments that arise unbidden from the brain's obsessive and subconscious searching for relationships among the myriad items stored in its own memory (see [5]).  He is concerned about the falling away of privacy as people sometimes rashly share thoughts that then permanently become embedded in the web's memory.  He notes too that a collaborative network structured by sharing many people's ideas can fall prey to a dominating personality who can transform the group into lemmings—independent brainwork by each of its many members is essential.  On the other hand, Thompson is less worried about the disruption multitasking imposes on our ability to concentrate for long periods on a single task, feeling that each of us will somehow figure out how to suppress multitask interruptions when we need to, while taking advantage of their value at other times.

  The pell-mell advance of the Information Age is of course unstoppable.  None of us can predict where it will lead in ten years, much less a century, no more than anyone in the early 19^th century could have predicted the impact of industrialization one hundred years later.  Will Homo sapiens evolve by the 22^nd century into a new cyborg/centaur species—call it Homo sapiens artificialis—with implanted electronics fully integrated into it?   Will it be a self-perpetuating species of the wealthier among us who can afford the implantations for themselves and their offspring?  Will Homo sapiens itself become a subordinated species? 

  Maybe we are headed for an apocalypse after all.

Online Education

  Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together, which I discussed in last week's posting, has a single sentence that has haunted me ever since I read it: "Today's young people have grown up … not necessarily tak[ing] simulation to be second best."  That mindset underlies the "alone together" syndrome that is afflicting society, especially our youngest generation.  In our drive to become digitally ever more together, we have paradoxically become ever more alone as we simulate traditional and intimate forms of contact with diluted ones online.

  Our best universities now seem to be on their way to exacerbating that syndrome by heavily adopting online learning.  MIT and Harvard recently jointly launched a nonprofit, online-education venture called edX. Almost simultaneously, Stanford, Princeton, and the Universities of Pennsylvania, California (Berkeley) and Michigan (Ann Arbor) joined a commercial online-education venture, Coursera.  The latest online courses have many technological bells and whistles—computer-mediated testing to provide students with feedback on their progress, social networks to enable discussion among them, automated and/or crowd-sourced grading, and so forth—that simulate the conventional learning environment.

  Both new ventures are stepping over the corpses of previous online efforts such as Fathom (Columbia, et al.), which failed in 2003, and AllLearn (Oxford, Yale and Stanford), which failed in 2006. Despite these failures, the universities involved in edX and Coursera seem mesmerized enough by online learning's possibilities to try again. I hope they are sufficiently aware of its dangers. The dangers are nuanced, depending on the objectives of the students.

  As a tool of continuing education in one's later years, online courses seem relatively benign, although even in this context they feed the "alone together" malaise.  Since edX and Coursera currently offer at most only certificates of completion, not college credits, they are well suited to the needs of this continuing-education audience. All the same, the logistics are unnerving: last fall, over 100,000 students around the world took three free, non-credit Stanford computer science classes online and tens of thousands satisfactorily completed them!

  The situation is much different for younger students seeking degrees. Neither their educational objectives nor their mature selves are fully formed, so interaction only with a screen cannot possibly substitute for the educational and personal maturation a "bricks and mortar" institution offers.  To the extent that complete courses of study leading to degrees are offered online (as the University of Phoenix now does) they cannot help but distort the very nature of education and its impact on such students. 

  Many arguments have been made both in favor of and against online education. The most telling one in favor is the democratization of access to learning, making it available to people around the world who could never otherwise have it. This argument alone can outweigh many of the traditional concerns.  Other less substantial but still important advantages are cited: additional students can enroll in overcrowded, much-sought-after courses at their own colleges; they can benefit from an ability to time-shift their attendance to hours that suit their own schedules and to "rewind" a lecture to review difficult parts; their access to the best teachers online may outweigh closer personal interaction with less talented ones available in a traditional setting. Further, there may be cost savings or income enhancements for struggling educational institutions, although the recent failures noted above call this into question.

  Some questions about possible drawbacks inherent in online courses have been asked by David Brooks in a column in the New York Times published just after edX was announced: Will massive online learning diminish the face-to-face community on which the learning experience has traditionally been based?  Will it elevate professional courses over the humanities?  Will online browsing replace deep reading?  Will star online teachers sideline the rest of the faculty?  Will academic standards drop?  Will the lack of lively face-to-face discussions decrease the passionate, interactive experience that education should be, reducing it to passive absorption of information?

  The many pros and cons are continuingly being parsed by those more expert than I.  However, from my viewpoint a sole desideratum should dominate the discussion: Since adoption of an online option aggravates the already severe "alone together" syndrome, it should be avoided if other options are available.  Using this criterion, an institution's quest for cost savings, productivity increases or income enhancement is insufficient in itself.  Likewise, a student's desire merely to substitute screen time for human interaction as a preferred mode of learning should be discouraged.  Students who must for some reason view a course's lecture component online should be required when possible to attend non-cyberspace support tutorials, seminars or discussion groups.

  The march toward broader adoption of online learning seems unstoppable, supported at both the top and bottom of the academic ladder.  Among its strong supporters in high places is Stanford president John Hennessy (see his article on the subject), who has enthusiastically predicted that this new wave of education will be something of a tsunami—an apt metaphor given the image of destruction it brings to my mind. At the student level, one finds that many students who are anyway always connected to the Internet don't think of online learning as second best.  They are comfortably at home on Facebook, with its billion users, so they find an online class of 100,000 unremarkable, and don't discern additional value in a class of forty in a traditional classroom.

  I am frightened by the likely acceptance of online education as a normal or even preferred mode of learning. Educational institutions may well soon face Hennessy's online tsunami, just as newspapers, book and music publishers, and magazines have.  I hope they, or at least some of them, will seek higher ground rather than scurry lemming-like into the deluge.  

Always Connected

  Writing this blog has alerted me to some of my internal contradictions.  For example, I yearn for equanimity, yet crave a faster connection to the Internet.  There's the rub: equanimity and torrents of data don't co-exist well, or at all.

  I guess I was vaguely aware of this contradiction before my blogging highlighted it, for in retrospect I realize I've been trying to sort it out.  I've persistently resisted replacing my antique voice-only cellphone with a smartphone, I suppose fearing that my tether to the Internet would be reinforced by mobile texting, browsing, email and apps.  At home I've come down to opening fewer than 1 in 4 of the emails in my already spam-free inbox.  I'm not active on social networks and I don't tweet.  Tilting the balance the other way, I've started blogging.  I think I've been searching all along for a sustainable equilibrium between the frenzy of technology and the stillness of self.  It's a hard struggle, but I think it essential for sanity in the Internet age.

  Many of us, particularly the young, are feeling the effects of not having such a balance.  Those effects are well analyzed by Sherry Turkle in her recent book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.  Turkle makes a compelling case that our expanding connectivity has had the perverse result of distancing us.  She has spent three decades as an MIT professor studying the issue, so I find no reason to challenge her credibility.

  Here are a few of the symptoms Turkle gives of an "alone together" syndrome: emailing or texting while in a meeting or dining with others; replacing intimate, spontaneous and hard-to-break-off telephone calls with less-demanding texts and emails; sidestepping the complexities of face-to-face friendships in favor of the less-stressful "friending" on Facebook or fantasy relationships with other avatars on Second Life. Today's young people, she says, are the first generation that does not take the simulation of closeness as second best to closeness itself.

  Turkle also has much to say about another symptom: multitasking.  By engaging in it, we enjoy the illusion that we are becoming more efficient, squeezing extra time into our already compressed schedules; we get high on that illusion.  What we have really done, she notes, is learned how to put others on hold as we switch among tasks, for we are actually capable of handling just one task at a time.  We now spend much of our time with family and friends distracted from giving them the full attention they deserve.  And all for naught, because research has shown that when we multitask our efficiency and the quality of our work are degraded. 

  I add two additional concerns to Turkle's, informed by my posting on creativity.  Being "alone together" in a crowd may prevent the random, impromptu interactions needed for communal creativity.  And having little or no down time for daydreaming may frustrate the Aha! part of individual creativity.

  For all the undisputed benefits of having a world of knowledge at our fingertips, this is a disheartening picture.  As a society we suffer from an Internet-driven obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Internal pressure assails us with withdrawal symptoms when our connection is broken, as if we had a substance addiction. (We do, although the "substance" is connectivity.)  External pressure adds to the malady, for employers are increasingly demanding 24x7 connectivity of their employees, even when on vacation.  Teenagers complain about like demands from their parents, who are newly empowered to keep track of them all the time.  I can't see how this can be good for any of us.

  Wait, it gets worse!  So far I've drawn just from the second part of Turkle's book, which is about always-connected networking.  The book's first part is about the growing impact of robots on our lives.  Today's young people, taken as they are with simulation, are more accepting of robots than the rest of us.  They grew up cherishing robotic toys like Furbies, which sold 40 million of their first generation from 1998-2000.  A third-generation will be introduced this year. 

  Those who are Furby-deprived might appreciate a description of the first Furby generation.  They were programmed to gradually speak English as they interacted with their owners, instead of their native "Furbish."  They demanded attention and responded lovingly when they got it with phrases like "I love you."  They could even communicate with other Furbies.  Like humans, they were always on—no switch—so the sole way to stop their sometimes annoying demands and chatter was to open them up with a screw driver and remove their batteries, in effect killing them.  Replacing the batteries reset them to their initial state, reincarnating them with no memory of what they came to "know" in their previous life.  Children actually mourned their death.  I can't imagine what the third-generation Furbies, fourteen years later, will be able to do, but their pretence of intelligent behavior will certainly be greater.

  Turkle's research shows that our youngest generation, primed by interaction with Furbies and other robotic toys, is quite open to the likely advent in a decade or two of widespread "intelligent" humanoid robots that could be lifelike and caring companions— even lovers and spouses (see a New York Times review of a 2007 book on that frightening reminder of Stepford Wives!).  I won't go there further, although Turkle does. My 20^th-century mind rebels.  I fear that the shards of human togetherness remaining in "alone together" will shatter further as togetherness with robots increases.  

  I flee back to the lesser dislocation of society occasioned only by the Internet's connectivity.   An eerily apt poem by Wordsworth from two centuries ago still rings true with its original words.  It becomes all the more pertinent to today's topic by deleting a single letter.  Try replacing "spending" with "sending."

The world is too much with us; late and soon,


Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;


Little we see in Nature that is ours;


We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!


This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,


The winds that will be howling at all hours,


And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,


For this, for everything, we are out of tune;



It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be


A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;


So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,


Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;


Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;


Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Thus did Wordsworth bemoan the societal costs of the industrial revolution.  We should listen to him as we reckon the costs of the information revolution.