Every 50 years or so, US magazine The Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled “As We May Think.” It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the World Wide Web. Two summers ago, The Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere’s most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
“Over the past few years,” Carr wrote, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now, my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
The title of the essay was misleading, because Carr’s target was not really the world’s leading search engine, but the impact that ubiquitous, always-on networking is having on our cognitive processes. His argument was that our deepening dependence on networking technology is indeed changing not only the way we think, but also the structure of our brains.
Carr’s article touched a nerve and has provoked a lively, ongoing debate on the Internet and in print (he has now expanded it into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains).
This is partly because he’s an engaging writer who has vividly articulated the unease that many adults feel about the way their modi operandi have changed in response to ubiquitous networking. Who bothers to write down or memorize detailed information any more, for example, when they know that Google will always retrieve it if it’s needed again?
The Web has become, in a way, a global prosthesis for our collective memory.
It’s easy to dismiss Carr’s concern as just the latest episode of the moral panic that always accompanies the arrival of a new communications technology. People fretted about printing, photography, the telephone and television in analogous ways. It even bothered Plato, who argued that the technology of writing would destroy the art of remembering.
However, just because fears recur doesn’t mean that they aren’t valid. There’s no doubt that communications technologies shape and reshape society — just look at the impact that printing and the broadcast media have had on our world. The question that we couldn’t answer before now was whether these technologies could also reshape us.
Carr argues that modern neuroscience, which has revealed the “plasticity” of the human brain, shows that our habitual practices can actually change our neuronal structures. The brains of illiterate people, for example, are structurally different from those of people who can read. So if the technology of printing — and its concomitant requirement to learn to read — could shape human brains, then surely it’s logical to assume that our addiction to networking technology will do something similar?
Not all neuroscientists agree with Carr and some psychologists are skeptical. Harvard’s Steven Pinker, for example, is openly dismissive. However, many commentators who accept the thrust of his argument seem not only untroubled by its far-reaching implications, but are positively enthusiastic about them.
When the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project asked its panel of more than 370 Internet experts for their reaction, 81 percent of them agreed with the proposition that “people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence.”
Others argue that the increasing complexity of our environment means that we need the Internet as “power steering for the mind.” We may be losing some of the capacity for contemplative concentration that was fostered by a print culture, they say, but we’re gaining new and essential ways of working.
“The trouble isn’t that we have too much information at our fingertips,” the futurologist Jamais Cascio says, “but that our tools for managing it are still in their infancy. Worries about ‘information overload’ predate the rise of the Web ... and many of the technologies that Carr worries about were developed precisely to help us get some control over a flood of data and ideas. Google isn’t the problem — it’s the beginning of a solution.”
The first Donald Trump term was a boon for Taiwan. The administration regularized the arms sales process and enhanced bilateral ties. Taipei will not be so fortunate the second time around. Given recent events, Taiwan must proceed with the assumption that it cannot count on the United States to defend it — diplomatically or militarily — during the next four years. Early indications suggested otherwise. The nomination of Marco Rubio as US Secretary of State and the appointment of Mike Waltz as the national security advisor, both of whom have expressed full-throated support for Taiwan in the past, raised hopes that
There is nothing the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) could do to stop the tsunami-like mass recall campaign. KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) reportedly said the party does not exclude the option of conditionally proposing a no-confidence vote against the premier, which the party later denied. Did an “actuary” like Chu finally come around to thinking it should get tough with the ruling party? The KMT says the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is leading a minority government with only a 40 percent share of the vote. It has said that the DPP is out of touch with the electorate, has proposed a bloated
Authorities last week revoked the residency permit of a Chinese social media influencer surnamed Liu (劉), better known by her online channel name Yaya in Taiwan (亞亞在台灣), who has more than 440,000 followers online and is living in Taiwan with a marriage-based residency permit, for her “reunification by force” comments. She was asked to leave the country in 10 days. The National Immigration Agency (NIA) on Tuesday last week announced the decision, citing the influencer’s several controversial public comments, including saying that “China does not need any other reason to reunify Taiwan with force” and “why is it [China] hesitant
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Saturday last week urged Taiwanese to exercise caution when traveling overseas, citing an intelligence report saying that China might attempt to arrest Taiwanese abroad. China in June last year issued 22 guidelines that allow its courts to try in absentia and sentence to death so-called “diehard” Taiwanese independence activists, even though Chinese courts have no jurisdiction in Taiwan. A senior Chinese official reportedly gave closed-door instructions to Chinese state security units to implement the guidelines in countries friendly to China, information gathered by Taiwan’s intelligence agencies suggested. The official reportedly said that “overseas police stations” and Chinese
RSS