The Internet Is Creating a More Ignorant Society

Sunday, March 11, 2012

 The other day I was struggling to remember a funny quote from a movie I had just seen the previous night. Did I have to engage in this mental battle with my faculties for long? Of course not. All I had to do was pull out my handy laptop, click on a little google button, and type in my question. Immediately dozens of answers were available at my disposal. Finding this answer required no more than a superficial browsing of my memory and very little physical effort other than moving my fingers over a keyboard.

        In rhetoric class, I felt more than a little guilty learning about the fourth canon of classical rhetoric Memoria, and the ability of the Greeks and Romans to train their minds to remember whole series of poetry, to chant the entirety of the Iliad or the Odyssey from memory, (in Greek, nonetheless!!) and to retain extensive stocks of definitions and progymnasmata, commonplaces to be used in argument. No doubt about it, those dudes had astounding memories, made even more retentive and accurate by constant training, both everyday and formal.

       Contrast it to our culture today... Do we even memorize our friends' phone numbers or emails anymore? No, we just "edit contact" and there: the computer has done the memorization for us. Do we quote poetry or readily offer answers to questions about historical data? Sometimes, but more often it is more convenient to google it, is it not? Google has eliminated the need to remember things, whether it be historical dates, friends' emails, that funny quote you heard on "Psych", or the name of that one character in that one book that I just read that one night... what was his name again? Hold on, let me look it up really quick... But lest we digress.

      The internet has not only decreased our need to retain information, it has also greatly reduced our ability to retain information. Perhaps this is less obvious, but it becomes apparent. After all, our memory is a muscle - if it is not used, it becomes weak and ineffective. It may become sore when you suddenly make use of it after it has spend a long period lying in inactivity. Author Nicholas Carr expresses a common effect of this disuse in his famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"; "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." Our unused memories are suffering and so are our attention spans, which are becoming shorter and shorter as our need to concentrate is being reduced by short articles, quick links, and fast-paced images of the internet.

      Has it ever bothered you when you go to type a search into google and it comes up with a million suggestions before you finish the sentence, or even the word? It irritates me that a soulless yet complex machine is haughtily predicting what I, a reasoning human being, want to find. What irritates me even more is that it's usually right; my query is almost always one of the suggestions, so I am able to gratefully cease the strenuous activity of actually typing it out and simply click...The internet therefore is making our society's memories weaker, our attention spans shorter, and individuals themselves lazier. All of this contributes to a stupider society. (Wow, I didn't even know "stupider" was a word until no squiggly red lines appeared underneath it!) We certainly "click too much, read too little, and remember even less."

      Yet another feature of the internet fostering ignorance is that it has reduced creative thought, which is related to the laziness factor. Take me, for example. Not all of the ideas and objections in this post are my own. Obviously that quote from the article above was not stored word for word in my human memory. It was the product of the process 1.) google, 2.) click, 3.) read, 4.) copy, 5.) paste, 6.) and add quotation marks. Instead of talking to people who share my ideas and who could contribute to the arguments in this post, all I need to do is search for similar articles online. Instead of having mental progymnasmata ready to use as did the ancient Greeks and Romans, it's extremely more convenient to utilize the pre-packaged arguments formulated by others. I do it myself often because it saves time and energy, (i.e., because I am lazy and uncreative, having few of my own ideas to offer.) But wait, this is the internet's fault. Or is it?

     This post isn't an environmental sermon attempting to convince readers to "unplug" and spend more time taking walks in the woods and looking up info in encyclopedias instead of online. I have just been thinking about the pros and cons of technology and decided to explore the arguments an anti-internet proponent would use to convince us that google is detrimental to our cognitive processes. In my next post I plan to play the advocatus diaboli and argue that the internet is, in fact, creating a more intelligent society - because this is not an issue I have made up my mind upon, and perhaps never will.

    Well, now I need to go chat with my friend, bookmark some interesting articles to aid me on my next post, look up that funny quote I couldn't remember off the top of my head, post a few tweets, research Emerson on RWE.com for my lit. class, edit a few contacts and answer a few emails. It's also a beautiful day so perhaps I'll turn on my ipod, put in my headphones, and listen to my favorite pop tunes while I look out the window.