A topic that seems to be getting more press these days is the debate over whether the Internet is making us dumber. There are commenter’s lining up on both sides of the issue and a recent book has stoked the fires. Nicholas Carr has written a number of opinions like this one, Is Google Making Us Stupid.

He uses the phraseology that the Internet is rewiring our brains. Whether he is right or wrong, I am intrigued with the concept that a piece of technology could cause our brains to operate in a new and different way.

We know from the medical research done on stroke victims that they brain does have the ability to map around damaged areas and repair itself in some ways. We also know that a person can completely change the way the view the world, and operate within it. In other words that in both a physical, and metaphysical sense we have the ability to rewire our brains as it were. So it is logical to think that technology could be changing the way our brains operate.

I first have to ask myself if we have any precedence for a technology rewiring our brains from before the Internet came along, and of course we have catalysts like television. Before we had instant access to billions of electronic pages, images, and video, we had access to a never-ending stream of visual stimulation. In it’s earlier days (back when I was a kid) TV was viewed much the same as the Internet is today. People that had not grown up with it felt it was too addictive, filled your head with junk, and often caused kids to just sit around for hours at a time when they could have been playing outside with a refrigerator box, or a some sticks. Sure, the moon landing was cool, but generally, there was not much on that was beneficial to ones life.

Eventually, TV matured to the point of new entertainment forms like MTV and that is when we started to notice that it was causing watchers to get a specific form of attention deficit. If content delivery in real life was not flashy, intriguing, loud, and fast paced, kids would lose interest in about 90 seconds. Teachers were the first to complain about the MTV generation and the difficulties in holding their attention. So did TV rewire a generations brains? Or, was TV just a dense information delivery source that made others look pale by comparison?

So along come the Internet and all of its permutations, such as social networking sites, YouTube, powerful search engines, Twitter, and other instant communication capabilities. Now we are seeing the amount of time spent watching TV dropping and the rate of Internet use increasing. We also see Internet devices becoming like outboard brains. We can lean on them to inform us of any fact, memorize bits of information on our behalf, help us communicate instantly with contacts, and find just about any piece of content every produced. Access to these capabilities from a device that fits in our pockets certainly impacts just about every aspect of life as we know it. Which brings us back to the question as to whether and outboard brain rewires our brains, and if so, how.

The assumption that we are dumber because we are leaning too hard on the outboard brain flies in the face of logic. The argument that we are interrupted by too much stimulation, or that we can just ask the magic box any question so we are not force to memorize the answers sounds good, but fails to really tell the whole story. Yes we are more interrupted by technology at this point. Yes, there is less of a need to memorize facts when they are all instantly available to us. But that pales in comparison to the positives we get from the Internet. I am going to simply list the positives, and rest my case because there really will be nothing else to say…

• Access to instructions on how to do anything you can possibly imagine allows us to learn how to do things we would have never learned before.
• A more dense stream of information naturally results in more knowledge sticking in ones brain. This offsets the debt paid for interruptions
• The instant ability to find any fact or figure at a moments notice gives us the ability to do research on any subject from anywhere we happen to be standing. This is all about learning, and we can now learn more conveniently than ever before.
• With one search, you can find multiple opinions on any subject in a way you could never do before. It would have taken hours at a library to even gather a handful of opinions on a subject in the past. This was a barrier that caused people to not even look. Think about the improvements in our ability to manage our own health instead of depending on a doctor as an example.
• The ability to build real time rivers of information on any subject so that we have information pushed to us in convenient ways allows us to stay current on any field of study, sport, health issue, career or subject. We simply had small and slow streams of information before the Internet. The volume of information on any one subject is now ten times what we once had at our fingertips.
• The ability to tap a community (our friends and contacts) to ask any question, at any time, from any place, gives us an ability to gain knowledge in an efficient way we have never had before.

Seriously… Saying the Internet makes us dumber would make about as much sense as saying that reading books at the library made us dumber.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com