Blessing or Curse?

The Internet can be a tremendous blessing. It allows us to reach more people than we can face to face, with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings of His Word. It can present useful ideas for us to think about, that we may not come in contact with elsewhere. It is an avenue that can be of great benefit.

On the other side, …

I was just proofreading some writing yesterday, covering the topic of being cautious in using the Internet. There are so many reasons.

• Identity theft – or personal theft (kidnappings, violence, etc.) – Be cautious about the info you give out.
• False information – anyone can say anything, true or false, publish it to a lot of websites and plenty of people will believe it. (Was it Hitler who said if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it?) – Be cautious about the info you take in.
• Evil content – this world is full of evil, and it all makes it’s way onto the Internet. But now you don’t have to go out into shadey parts of town to find it. It can come straight into your own home. – Be cautious about the places and people you allow to “visit” your home.
• Promotion of a-musement – we live in an entertainment obsessed society, desiring to turn off the brain and just be. Be acted upon rather than act, spectate rather than do. Our society is not only growing dumber, they don’t care. Why think or learn when you have all the knowledge of the world at the tips of your fingers to pass on to others? Why make your mind work and store things when you have 250 GB of hard storage plus unfathomable info for the taking sitting on your desk? Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.
  • TV, video and computer games have lulled our society to sleep.
  • Email, instant messaging, and cell phone texting has lowered our society’s literacy requirements and expectations tremendously. Not only can they not write or spell. Now they don’t have to, and are encouraged not to.
  • It’s promoted an inactive, unhealthy society. Why get up and do anything, when I have the world at my fingertips, and I can “virtually participate”?
  • Be cautious that you don’t turn your mind off. Think about what you see and read, process it, adopt it wisely and promote it with clarity.
  • Be cautious about the amount of time you spend on it. Get up and go do something physically productive!

I’m sure there are more reasons, but the one that troubles me most is the numbing and dumbing aspect. Two books I’ve recommended for quite some time have sounded the warning –  Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto, 1992   and Endangered Minds by Jane Healy, 1990 – both long before the public Internet.

Today, American Vision’s email addressed this issue, from a bit different angle. Below is a bit of what they said. Read the whole article here.

Mark Bauerlein is warning about what he describes as the “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future” (2007) [or read his 8 points here]. Nicholas Carr, writing in July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly asks, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” [Don’t miss reading this one!] Don’t get me wrong. I love the digital age and what it has done to make gobs of information available in a blink of an eye. It’s unfortunate, however, that many people never learned that there are pitfalls and obstacles in the information business.

Is the Internet Making Some People Stupid and Gullible?
– Gary DeMar, July 8, 2008

[my comments in brackets]

DeMar notes the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I clicked the link, since this is a topic of interest to me, and ended up spending more time than a wanted online, reading an unusual-by-its-length article. Carr speaks the things I’ve concluded about this, and below I’ve pasted many quotes from the article that struck me. Read the whole article here.:

…Over the past few years 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.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. …

…media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski….

…“I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”…

…the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,”…

…thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”…

…The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. …

…Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. …

…the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. …We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. …

…“‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”… [interesting thought – just pasted to think upon 🙂 Could it possibly have some validity? Don’t know.]

…The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. … the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. …

…Taylor’s ethic [of industrial manufacturing] is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. … What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. …

…In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. …

… [Google’s founders] speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” …

…their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. … The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction. …

After relating the mixed blessing and curse of the Internet, Carr concludes:

Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. …

…we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”…

Read the whole article to
put all these quotes in context.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?
by Nicholas Carr

(I don’t know anything else about this author – but this article rings true with me. Even though the Atlantic Monthly, where it is posted, is loaded with Obama for Pres banners. – God help us.)

Perhaps this is why we at Me and My House promote learning based on “old paths” – those time proven methods of seeking wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, which God declares bring success.

The Internet can be a help as we teach and learn. If you choose to use it, since you have – noted by the fact that you are reading this 🙂 – supplement with the Internet judiciously. Use it sparingly. Use it cautiously. Never forget it is reflective learning that leads to wisdom.

Pray for the completion of R Road to Biblical Wisdom – hopefully to be published this month.