I can kinda see a bunch of Sumerians sitting around in a barley beer bar and arguing “you know, this … making of markings on clay. It will be the ruin of education and true knowledge. People won’t need to know anything in their heads anymore, it will all be marked down in clay!” 
I think that’s what the book is saying; that we do need both, and the trend we are experiencing is to have less deep knowledge for more superficial knowledge, rather than building both together. We put an emphasis on finding facts fast, and finding out more things, rather than taking what we’ve learned and sitting back and figuring out what that means and assigning some deeper meaning to it.
I think you’re looking at the wrong indicators to say that loss of empathy and compassion aren’t happening. I think we’re experiencing less social interaction, making fewer friends, becoming busier and allowing personal relationships to suffer, and creating fewer emotionally intimate relationships. From this site:
The claim is that the internet is causing us to remember differently, and that seems to be fairly well-proven. This article from ScienceBlog indicates that
This may end up being a good thing, with people focussing more on actual learning rather than rote memorization, or it may just be a necessary evil, since the internet isn’t going away.
I read the original article a while back, and basically responded “well, duh.” Then I read the book a few months ago, and was pretty “meh” about it - there wasn’t much more meat there. A whole book belaboring the point of the supposedly astounding realizations of how people use the internet to browse.
What I find amusing is that simply by disconnecting from the wired world and working to create this book, the author pretty savagely guts his own argument that people are going to be incapable of deep thought and concentrated work. It seems like he’s arguing that it is a terrible thing that people are going to be so shallow now, but honestly, I think the great majority of people always WERE shallow. If he can notice that in himself and act to counteract the effect with so little effort, I think that makes his argument seem more like “oh, look, the internet. Another way for all those shallow people to enjoy their lives and not be deep important thinkers like me.”
What I DID think was pretty interesting was his passing mention that the whole “deep thinking” aspect of human history was an accident - caused by the limitations and necessary types of use of that terrible new invention - the book.
I was a little sad that he didn’t go any further down that path, because really, the idea makes a lot of sense. If you don’t have a good breadth of knowledge, like RickJay explained excellently just now, then it’s not really possible to have much depth. The general illiterate populace of the world wasn’t thinking deeply about philosophy or history because they didn’t KNOW anything about it - all they knew was their local world, and whatever was told them by other locals or the limited passers-by they saw.
So, when you look at it that way, the internet is restoring us to our natural state of being hyperactive crack-ferrets, popping our heads out of the bushes to bestow a startled glance on every new stimulus that pings its way through Facebook or our cellphones.
I think following that train of thought, and then thinking more solidly about the revolution of thought that followed the original print media explosion, would have been a much more nuanced (and to me, much more interesting) treatise.
Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun:
[QUOTE=Socrates]
But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”
[/QUOTE]
I don’t really understand the complaint here:
(a Scienceblog quote, in CW’s post #22).
I mean, this is my experience with books and printed materials, and (I assumed) most people’s. If it’s in my kitchen, I don’t need to memorize the recipies in the latest Betty Crocker cookbook. If I have a map beside me, I don’t need to know every street in Chicago in order to navigate. The pieces of information that I know I can easily find in printed materials has always been a much larger set than the pieces of information that I have memorized.
I don’t see how the “treatment of information” attributed to the internet is so different from how we treat information on printed materials.
As an aside, the first thought that struck me when I read the OP is “Think the guy’s got problems now? Wait until some bright person figures out how to interface a database and your mind, giving us total access to billions of datapoints: how to fix a car, how to fry chicken, what is this thing, what is the population of Russia, what date was the Magna Carta signed… all these questions answered merely through the effort of thinking enough to ask them. He and his are going to flip.”
Too late for ETA: See, even Socrates agrees with me.
/win
Perhaps it isn’t. Socartes was probably right in saying that the existence of books would decrease ability to remember things. Obviously there’s a continuum from ‘all memory, no records’ to ‘all records, nothing memorized’. Somewhere along that continuum is the optimum. I don’t think, and traditionally academia has not thought, that the optimum is where we memorize as little as possible just because it’s all written down.
In medical school, future doctors memorize names and locations of hundreds of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and so forth. In law school, future lawyers memorize large amounts of laws, cases, and related information. In taxonomy classes, future biologists memorize huge lists of animal and plant species. All of this information is certainly available in books and has been for generations, yet we’ve decided as a society that these professionals needs to know this stuff. When an upcoming doctor spends a lot of time and effort memorizing the details of the human body, he or she becomes familiar with the human body. It is part of the process whereby the doctor builds up a thorough mental understanding of the body.
There is?
Do people actually remember less because something’s written down? Really? How would you even measure that? You might be able to convince me people could remember different things, but how on earth could you establish that people would remember less information in general?
Memorization in law school is for the sole purposes of regurgitating it once: on the Bar Exam. Not only are law students not intended to memorize for the purpose of actually practicing law, it would be malpractice to go from memory.
I also haven’t read this book. But from the description it sounds like another example of the “kids today” genre. The basic formula is:
- Things are different from when I was growing up
- My way was obviously superior
The problem is the authors of these books usually equate familiarity with superiority. Even if they claim to have objective evidence, it’s usually based on establishing their favored way as a standard and then measuring how closely other ways match this artificial standard.
Have not read the book, but have wanted to. Generally I think it is important that we have the intellectual capacity to think about and critique the technologies we use. My guess is that many of us here read books less than we used to (pre-internet) and there is ample evidence that kids today are not reading much at all. Reading touches on emotion, imagination and wonder in ways that the internet can’t. I find myself more satisfied reading, but more impulsive and “hooked” online. SDMB is partly to blame for this.
One of the best books I’ve read is Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”. Disregard the absurdity of the title and you will find one of the most rich and interesting analyses of how television has negatively impacted the development of a critical and active mind. I actually found it quite chilling.
I do wonder how many of us will look back on our lives and wonder “Gosh, what the hell was I doing on the internet for all those years?”
Apologies if getting off-track…
I think the author actually did a pretty good job of not just making it about “kids today.” He was focusing more on how it is changing adults and society than on how kids are being brought up in a world where they have never known what it is like to not be connected.
I also think he did a good job of showing how things are indeed changing. He had a slant, no doubt about it (his thesis wasn’t, “Is this happening?”; it was “This is happening, and this is how”), but his evidence was fairly overwhelming.
Again, I don’t know if it will be a bad, good, or neutral thing that we are all behaving so much differently than humans have ever behaved before; we’re in uncharted waters here. I think there are some caution flags that we would be fools to ignore, though.
Not at all off-track, ecoaster. I think I’ll put that book on my reading list. 
I didn’t mean it just literally as just being an issue about kids. I was just reflecting that some people appear to feel any change is for the worse. Haven’t they ever heard of the concept of progress?
Carr can be upset that people are thinking “broadly” rather than “deeply” but you could just as easily argue that an ability to think about multiple subjects is a sign of greater intelligence. The capacity to look information up is an improvement over having to rely on whatever information you can memorize (and two people being able to look up the same cite is better than arguing over who remembers a “fact” better). What he calls a distracted and overstimulated environment could also be called an environment rich in information. And the fact that a group of people who live in Alberta, Montana, Ontario, Virginia, Texas, and New York are discussing his work suggests his notion that the internet is making us disconnected from other people is wrong.
This is only on point if there is something particularly important about reading physical books as opposed to reading other things.
I’d be surprised if that were so. Have you seen the young adult sections of bookstores lately?
And thinking about things other than books, note that kids today live in a world absolutely saturated with text in a way that has never been the case in any previous generation. In fact, young’n’s these days probably communicate with each other through text more than through the spoken word.
Actually, the exact opposite is true. Kids are reading more than ever. And teens are reading more than ever. Adult reading has stayed about the same for roughly 60-70 years (I’m sorry, I don’t remember the actual number).
What do you think they’re doing? They’re texting and calling to set up places to meet.
I think everyone on the Dope knows I’m a librarian. Today, a pair of teens came in looking for pictures of items they needed to find for a scavenger hunt. As they were talking to each other, they were also trash-talking the other team with their cell phones. As time ran out on the game, they left to meet up with the other team and more of their mutual friends for a massive birthday lunch for one of them. They were having so much fun that they thought nothing of sharing their good day with a stranger who was ten years their senior.
Kids today are just fine. The world is in good hands. And I think it’s partially due to the Internet making equals out of a lot of kids who would have been absolutely tortured in the past.
Here’s what I know about myself.
I have learned more things, been entertained more regularly, gained new abilities and skills, read more widely, been more enlightened through different points of view, and more well informed on global events from multiple sources, live and more accurate, because of my access to the Internet.
I can purchase, witness, consume, and self-educate easier, and therefore more often, than I ever could hope to before.
I have had multiple job opportunities that not only I would have no access to, but didn’t even exist as a potential occupation, before the Internet.
And I believe we’ve all benefited similarly.
The worst side-effect of the global awareness the Internet has brought, is that we are now more socially connected to people who are less intelligent than oneself, which skews our perceptions.
There have always been unintelligent or less educated people, but most of us didn’t have to deal with them directly. Now we encounter them a lot, simply because we’re all online and the new online social communities we participate in include them more often. It makes it appear that they’re increasing in their number or their stupidity, but I think they are actually gaining a lot of educational opportunities they wouldn’t have pre-Internet.
FTW!
Just wait til we have holodeck technology.
Personally I think it’s much ado about nothing, in terms of a warning. Yes, definitely things are changing in a huge way. But they are neither changing for the better or worse. They are simply changing in the direction of greater variety and freedom. Nothing is stopping anyone from living a life of values that predated the internet. You can continue to memorize and tell oral stories if you wish. You can continue to do trigonometry and long division in your head if you wish. The only difference is that now you have the choice to do something else instead.
The average person today has more conceptual knowledge about things than the entire population of the planet not too long ago.
They have less specific knowledge of certain things - like history, and specific trades. But more power - someone some time ago might have intricate knowledge of the machinery needed for a printing press, but a person today can word process and print tons of copies for minimal effort and cost.
I do kind of think though that there is some value in having some familiarity with the steps that led us to the current moment, if only to put it in context. I think it strengthens a person’s sense of place in space-time to reexperience the evolution of steps that proceeded that particular context, in much the same way that it’s useful for a baby to learn to crawl before it learns to walk. I know there are other studies about development that show that in learning certain things, it’s helpful to experience protostages first.
So while the internet is wonderful, maybe it would be useful for us to teach kids some oral skills first, then writing/reading, then internet (or whatever). And basic arithmetic, then algebra, then calculators, then Mathematica. Etc.
Actually, maybe every single academic subject should be taught historically.
Facts outside of context (and citation) are ungrounded. They take on much more meaning (and are learned better) within a context - either historically, or perhaps in a laboratory recreation.
So the internet is fine. I would just make education more grounded historically, experimentally, and citationally. And throw in a lot more practical knowledge. Kids learning about physics formulas having to do with electricity should at the same time be building basic circuits and blinky LED toys.
I think you are very clearly mistaken. A very comprehensive NEA study in 2007 indicated declines in voluntary reading in all age groups (http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/trnr.html). Also see the Executive summaryof a report from the UK’s National Literacy Trust that clearly indicates kids are reading less now than they were in 2005 (
The “Harry Potter Effect” is great, but not saving book reading for kids. Kids may be reading more online, but not books. It remains to be seen what effect e-readers will have on reading frequency.
The fact that you are a librarian is skewing your perspective…
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You’ve cited an old version of that study. The current version shows reading up across all age levels (http://arts.gov/news/news09/ReadingonRise.html).
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That said, the study in question excludes online reading, non-fiction books, magazines and reading done for school/work.
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Sales of youth-targeted books are higher than they’ve been since the 1940s (http://www.seattlepi.com/ae/books/article/Teens-buying-books-at-fastest-rate-in-decades-1230449.php).
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You’re right, I am a librarian so I’m probably biased. But I am also on the front lines of the “kids/teens aren’t reading” debate and I have to say, it’s hogwash. Kids are reading a ton. Is it every kid? No. But did every kid read when I was a youngin’ back in the 80s/90s? Fuck no!
That’s a good point, and I think it is definitely one of the strengths of the internet - we’re all bringing such varied life experiences and cultures and living situations to the discussion that would have been very difficult to do in a world without the internet.
People are reading books more? That is good news. I also like your idea about teaching with more depth, jackdavinci, and I can see using the internet to do that, too.