SPIKE//

There’s this line of research about whether the internet is making us stupid, or more stupid than we already were. The idea is, if you consciously know that information is easily accessible (and re-accessible) then you don’t bother to deeply encode or learn it; your lazy ass presumes the data source will continue to exist, available as a cheat-sheet in case you need to re-up sometime in the future. Since we can now use the internet to outsource huge stores of knowledge, we don’t bother truly learning things anymore. Thus, the internet is making us vapid information whores.

While this is a swell line of research and I believe there have been robust findings suggesting that we are, in fact, getting dumber, the premise is thoroughly unoriginal. Thousands of years ago Socrates was (according to Plato’s Phaedrus) up in arms about the novel technology of writing. Socrates believed writing would reduce dependence on memory and thinking, which would undermine pillars of Greek culture like oral storytelling and rhetoric. Also, if important ideas were written down, dumb people might misunderstand and misrepresent them, like I’m doing with my rushed wikipedia review on the very subject matter. (Meta!) Clearly the detrimental nature of information outsourcing is not a new problem in epistemology, but the issue seems to have gotten a lot of play in the media lately. (Of course, I couldn’t remember where I’d heard about it exactly, and neither do you, so let me google that for us; triple double meta).

I always thought, even when I was little, that it was ok not to know, as long as you knew where or how to find the answer. There’s no expectation to memorize the dictionary as long as you know how to use it to find the word you’re looking for. And you don’t have to teach yourself the intricacies of indoor plumbing as long as you know someone who knows a guy. It’s nothing new: people have been outsourcing knowledge as long as there has been knowledge. With so much information in the world, there’s probably no limit on how much we can’t know. And the more we don’t know, the more we’re forced to interact with the world, just to keep up: social networking, asking favors, asking questions, exploring. Even a simple Boulean search reminds me that we’re all connected in an unfathomably vast barter economy of knowledge and skills. I will trade my humble question for a sliver of your understanding. 

This is a luxury: to ask questions and expect accurate responses. Curiosity strikes me as a special, intrinsically motivating indulgence. Curiosity leads me down unchartered knowledgeways and brings me into contact with people and ideas I didn’t know I hadn’t thought of yet. And if that’s not exciting enough, I get to take that information and pass it along to other people. I imagine it like a bucket brigade of thoughts and light and pure awe.

If information and answers weren’t so readily available, would curiosity be stifled? Conversely, does the internet’s ubiquity make us more curious? I want to believe that it does. And assuming the internet does afford us the luxury of curiosity, has it made us any better at communicating new knowledge to others? That, to me, is the important question.

If the research is to be believed, then, yeah, we’re probably getting dumber via the internet. If you’ve read this far, you’re almost certainly a moron. On the other hand, on an evolutionary timescale, humans are likely becoming intellectually fitter with each generation. Maybe it balances out in the long run. I wonder.