In 2008, tech scholar Nicholas Carr sparked an earnest debate when he proclaimed in The Atlantic magazine that Google is making us stupider.
Habitually link-hopping down the rabbit hole of online information, Carr argued, has degraded our collective attention span and threatens to permanently downgrade our intelligence. Rather than reading for context and nuance, the Internet encourages us to skim for fast facts that lack substance.
But Carr hasn’t spoken the last word in whether the Internet makes you smart or dumb – far from it, in fact.
Not only did his Google thesis quickly attract rebuttals extolling the potential intellectual virtues of Internet use, but the Pew Internet Project, in conjunction with Elon University, also surveyed 371 telecommunications experts to help settle the score. Responding to the question of “whether Google is making people stupid,” a majority of respondents – 81 percent – countered that the search engine and the Internet is doing just the opposite.
“There is no doubt that the Internet is making much more information available, instantly, in more formats to more people, thus this tool is seen as definitely enhancing the intelligence of those who are fortunate enough to be able to go online,” said Janna Anderson, director the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University.
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While the Internet is still a work in progress, Anderson sees it as an indisputably positive construction project.
“Because of the Internet we can share our collective intelligence to continue to move forward,” Anderson said. “Refinement of all levels of Internet architecture and the applications we use online is in constant development, and evolution is never-ending. It’s always getting better, always being refined.”
That may ring true for the tech types who have a direct hand in molding online infrastructure, but what about the everyday surfers who might spend more time updating their Facebook statuses and watching viral YouTube videos than taking advantage of the scholarly smorgasbord at their fingertips?
Take online learning, for example. A recent study comparing students’ academic performances from classroom versus online instruction in the same microeconomics course highlighted potential pitfalls of the Web as a learning tool.
Female students appeared to learn just as well in front of a teacher as they did in front of a screen, while males, Hispanics and academically struggling students’ grades suffered from online instruction.
“We certainly find that Internet-based delivery of traditional classes has different effects on different types of students,” said lead study author and Northwestern University economist, David Figlio.
At the same time, Figlio didn’t interpret his study results as an argument against online learning. Rather, the results should serve as a warning that online courses might not be a one-size-fits-all resource.
"I absolutely believe that the Internet can be beneficial for education, and I have witnessed Internet-based classes that I think are phenomenal,” Figlio explained. “My study’s results suggest that doing what many colleges and universities are contemplating – taking traditional lecture-based classes and sticking them on the Internet – may be detrimental, and that schools considering going down that path should do so very cautiously.”
In that way, the Internet isn’t different from traditional instruction and learning tools (i.e. books) at our disposal. Different people use the information, digest it and retain it differently.
Perhaps then, the question isn’t whether the Internet makes you smarter or dumber, but rather whether the Internet is changing our concept of what constitutes intelligence -- especially for younger generations who have grown up with the Web.
“I think we are at a really interesting point in society and in education especially, where many would agree that the definition of ‘smart’ goes beyond what we currently test on IQ tests or subject matter standardized tests,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning sciences assistant professor at the University of Maryland specializing in adolescent Internet habits.
In the digital age, intelligence has expanded beyond acquiring knowledge, Greenhow says, to actively “contributing to the collective intelligence.”
And just like people are free to purchase pulp fiction instead of classic literature at the bookstore, they can cruise for infotainment instead of in-depth news analysis online. Likewise, for the user-generated Web 2.0, content creators can toss up cute cat videos rather than fine tune Wikipedia articles.
But until more empirical data can definitively map out how the Internet shapes us as we’re simultaneously shaping it, some wiggle room remains in the debate Nicholas Carr started.
“As to whether kids’ patterns of learning and information retention are changing for better or worse (due to the Internet), I think it’s probably a bit of both as there are costs and benefits to all change, and society, as Nicholas Carr acknowledges, can only project out so far on itself,” Greenhow said.
Photo: Mieke Dalle/Getty Images
Tags: Communication, Computer Networking, Computers, Health, Internet
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