Is the Internet changing our brains? It seems unlikely to me, but I’ll leave that question to evolutionary biologists. As a writer, thinker, researcher and teacher, what I can attest to is that the Internet is changing our habits of thinking, which isn’t the same thing as changing our brains. The brain is like any other muscle — if you don’t stretch it, it gets both stiff and flabby. However, if you exercise it regularly, and cross-train, your brain will be flexible, quick, strong and versatile.
In one sense, the Internet is analogous to a weight-training machine for the brain, as compared with the free weights provided by libraries and books. Each method has its advantage, but used properly one works you harder. Weight machines are directive and enabling: They encourage you to think you’ve worked hard without necessarily challenging yourself.
The Internet can be the same: It often tells us what we think we know, spreading misinformation and nonsense while it’s at it. It can substitute surface for depth, imitation for originality, and its passion for recycling would surpass the most committed environmentalist.
In 10 years, I’ve seen students’ thinking habits change dramatically: If information is not immediately available via a Google search, students are often stymied. But of course what a Google search provides is not the best, wisest or most accurate answer, but the most popular one.
However, knowledge is not the same thing as information, and there is no question to my mind that the access to raw information provided by the Internet is unparalleled and democratizing.
Admittance to elite private university libraries and archives is no longer required, as they increasingly digitize their archives. We’ve all read the jeremiads that the Internet sounds the death knell of reading, but people read online constantly — we just call it surfing now.
What they are reading is changing, often for the worse; but it is also true that the Internet increasingly provides a treasure trove of rare books, documents and images, and as long as we have free access to it, then the Internet can certainly be a force for education and wisdom, and not just for lies, damned lies, and false statistics.
In the end, the medium is not the message, and the Internet is just a medium, a repository and an archive. Its greatest virtue is also its greatest weakness: It is unselective. This means that it is undiscriminating, in both senses of the word. It is indiscriminate in its principles of inclusion: Anything at all can get into it. But it also — at least so far — doesn’t discriminate against anyone with access to it.
This is changing rapidly, of course, as corporations and governments seek to exert control over it. Knowledge may not be the same thing as power, but it is unquestionably a means to power. The question is, will we use the Internet’s power for good, or for evil? The jury is very much out. The Internet itself is disinterested, but what we use it for is not.
Sarah Churchwell is a senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia.
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