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.

Simplifying Capitalism - Part/Chapter One

Relating Economic Freedom & Political Freedom

Assuming all my readers are conservative Americans, such as myself, I'm pretty sure you all agree with me on several basic political principles...that Americans should be free to buy/sell what they want, that freedom of speech and opinion are fundamental natural rights, that we should not oppress one another, and that we should abide by the laws of our country. These are principles that are found, not only in the ideas and writings of the Founding Fathers, but in the Torah as well. In the Communistic governments of China and Russia we have seen examples of political systems which flout these principles of human rights and individual freedom.
        How does the economy relate to these? How can our system of buying and selling affect our political freedoms of speech and thought? And vice versa - how do politics affect the economy? Do labor unions, wage standards, and the price of laundry detergent have anything at all to do with voting, the Constitution, or America's laws? In Milton Friedman's first chapter of Capitalism and Freedom, he demonstrates that political freedom and economical freedom are intimately related, and explores the relationship between the two entities. Also in this chapter Friedman discusses the market as a direct part of freedom, the relation between market arrangements and political freedom as well as briefly tracing the development of free trade concepts and outlining the ideal economy promoting a free society.       
        First of all, Friedman states that only certain arrangements between these two freedoms are possible - more specifically, that only a competitive capitalistic economy ensures political freedom. (Big surprise.) In other words, a country where people are free to start their own private businesses, compete with other businesses, buy what they want, and sell what they want, all without restrictions of the federal government or anything else, is the only kind that also ensures political freedom. We will be free to live securely in liberty if a capitalistic infrastructure is in place.
        In the early 1800s, the trend was laissez-faire economics, ("LAH zay fair", French for basically "do what you want,") which seemed to work very well and greatly improved the conditions of the masses. But then the trend changed, and government began to interfere in the economy more and more - "Welfare rather than freedom became the dominant note in democratic countries." And after World War Two, this collectivist trend was briefly interrupted by a reversal in economic policies and an increased emphasis on private markets. Now we are back to more government and less individualism once more. During these twists and turns in the economy, political freedom has fallen suit - strangely enough, whenever the market was left alone and individuals were free to compete in trade, the nation's population did very well and enjoyed greater freedoms. Whenever welfare prevailed and government stepped into private business affairs, the people suffered, politically and economically. 
       Next Friedman states that there are two ways to manage the economic activities of the masses - either military/totalitarian coercion, or voluntary individual cooperation; "the technique of the market place." He is saying the government can force people to buy and sell what the government wants them to, or they can allow the natural laws of supply and demand to determine the market. Obviously the latter is the most appealing mode of management...
     What does a "free private enterprise exchange economy" look like, and why is it so desirable? These are questions that Milton Friedman will spend the rest of his book answering in detail, but he also briefly and simply answers them in a few paragraphs in the first chapter. Essentially, capitalism in action is - a business that uses the resources it controls to produce goods and services, which, in turn, it exchanges for goods and services produced by other businesses, on terms mutually acceptable to both. Money is the exchangeable commodity that makes this transaction that much easier.
      On a very simple level, let's take a very simple example of a free-enterprise market. Let's say I run a butcher shop. You need meat, so you come into my butcher shop and I provide you with the resources, (meat,) and skills, (preparing and packaging the meat,) that you cannot provide for yourself, because you don't have the resources, skill, or time. In return, you give me money, which I can then use to provide for myself the things I need. I go to the bakery and buy bread with that money, because I don't have the resources (flour, ovens, bakers, etc.,) or the time, or the skills, to bake bread myself. Thus you have provided me with something I don't have, and I have provided you with something you don't have. That is a mutual exchange. This is capitalism in its purest and most basic form.
       Maybe another butcher opens a similar shop down the street. Maybe he has a larger variety, or cheaper prices, or better quality of meats - so you go to him to buy meat instead. That's free choice. You can decide which butcher you like better. I want more money so I can buy bread for my family, so I lower my prices, or I expand my variety, or I better my quality of meat to bring in more business. That's competition. Does this competition hurt you, the customer? On the contrary, it lowers prices and improves quality/quantity for you, which is very beneficial for you. These laws - the laws of mutual exchange, free choice, and competition - are the basic tenets of capitalism. It is obvious how letting these laws alone to freely balance and improve the market in turn lead to greater freedom of choice and a more prosperous economy. Adam Smith called these natural laws "the invisible hand" of the market.
      What does this have to do with politics? History may prove that people are more free when they can buy/sell what they want, but why is this so? Well, for once thing, minorities are more free under a free market because the market is impartial. When you buy bread at a bakery you don't know if the flour was grown by a black person or white person, and you probably don't care. Thus minorities are less likely to be discriminated against in a free-enterprise society. Also, the market naturally "gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want... each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants, and get it; he does not have to see what color the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit."
        For another thing, the economy has long been a powerful source of coercion by despotic governments - Communist governments make their people their political slaves by determining what they can or can't buy, what occupations they can or cannot hold, what they can sell or not sell. They take away their political freedoms by taking away their economical freedoms. In a society where the government doesn't interfere with the economy, this source of force is gone.
       In conclusion, the principles and ideas outlined in this chapter are extremely important to our understanding of what a capitalistic economy should look like. It is vital for Americans to grasp the basics. Friedman covered numerous extremely significant points about economics and politics, and I hope that my interpretation of his thought is accurate and made good sense. Questions/criticisms/praises are encouraged below! :)

Simplifying Capitalism - Introduction

If I stopped the average American on the street and asked them what they thought of Communism, nine times out of ten the reaction towards this institution would be negative.

Most Americans are afraid of Communism for many reasons, the main one being that they have very recently been eyewitnesses to its oppressive and destructive effects on the peoples/economies of China, Russia, and others in the forms of censorship of the press, violent authoritarianism, harsh quenching of liberties such as liberty of speech and thought, savage anti-religion campaigns, etc. McCarthyism in the 1950s was one example of how Americans feel about Communism - so was the largely unsuccessful and embarrassing Vietnam War of the 60's and 70's - and so was the Cold War of the 80's. Fear of 'Commies' pervades this nation.

Yet how many of us really understand the philosophies of Karl Marx in all of their complexity? What element(s) of Communism make it so repressive of mankind's natural rights and liberties? Americans understand from the examples of China and Russia that Communism is wrong, but do they ultimately recognize why? Something vital to understand is that Communist theories are fundamentally unsound, which has in turn led to phenomena like censorship of the press in Russia and 70 million deaths under Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976.) These cases of massacre and oppression are not radical, rogue events perpetrated by insane leaders - they are the results of an economic philosophy, one that blatantly contradicts the guiding premises of the Jewish Torah.

In summary, to understand why "Communism is bad" one must first understand what Communism essentially is. However that is a study for another post. At present, I'm going to take the opposite side and discuss what Communism is not.

Communism's nemesis, as you probably know, is capitalism. There are many definitions of this word, and for the time, I'm going to put those aside and look at capitalism how the Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman understands it in his book Capitalism and Freedom. I'm reading this book for my literature class at the moment, and to better understand it (not exactly Dr.Seuss level stuff, just sayin'!) I'm planning on blogging my notes. You may not be a politician or Barack Obama's economic adviser, yet I think it's still important that everyone understand what a free market should look like and why Communist economic thought is fundamentally wrong. In any case it will be interesting to learn more about what one of the greatest thinkers of the century has to say about Communistic fallacies and how our government could be doing it better.