Is the Net Impeding Our Intellectual Life (or Something Else)?
posted by Danielle Citron
Recent books and articles contend that the Internet has made us narcissistic, shallow, and uncreative. See here, here, and here. According to critics, search engines produce easy answers, discouraging independent and critical thinking. They also provide access to bogus information, confirming prejudices and fostering stupidity and extremism. These arguments seemingly build on the work of many thoughtful scholars, such as Neil Postman who authored Amusing Ourselves to Death and Benjamin Barber who wrote Consumed.
In Wired, David Wolman takes this argument to task, characterizing these critics as modern-day Chicken Littles. Just as the telephone did not extinguish letter writing and modern transportation did not ruin community life, the Internet will not stunt intellectual life in the twenty-first century. Wolman argues that digital technologies, in fact, give us more opportunity to become engaged in the world of ideas. Wikipedia and Wiktionary demonstrate a bona fide hunger for learning and accurate information. And irrationality and prejudice cannot be blamed on technology—it was there long before the emergence of the Internet and will remain long after we have moved on to another communications medium.
The Internet’s overall impact on our intellectual life is surely debatable. But recent reports suggest that it is having a positive effect on our family lives, bringing us in closer contact with our loved ones than ever before. As the Washington Post notes today, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report, described as the first of its kind, that finds our families lives richer as a result of Information Age technologies. The report notes that 25 percent of adults said that cellphone calls, emails and text messages, and other forms of online communications made their families closer. 60 percent of responding adults said that the technologies had no impact on their family lives, and only 11 percent said the technology had a negative effect. 47 percent of the adults said cellphones and the Internet had improved family communication. Barry Wellman, an author of the report and sociology professor at the University of Toronto, explained that the communication innovations allow families to “know what each other is doing during the day” and does not “cut back on their physical presence with each other.” The findings were based on a nationally representative poll of 2,252 people, which explored technology use and profiled a group of 482 adults with children.
October 20, 2008 at 11:25 am
Posted in: Culture
Print This Post
Responses (3)
Frank - October 20, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I think that what linguist David Crystal (via Scott McLemee) says about texting applies to internet communication as well:
“Beyond its utilitarian value of permitting users to say as much as they can in as few keystrokes as possible (which also means saving money) the language of texting is a manifestation of “the human ludic temperament,” as Crystal puts it. That is, it is a form of play: something closely associated with the process of learning to use language itself. Pace the alarms occasionally raised about how texting undermines literacy, Crystal cites recent studies showing that pre-teen students who text had standard language skills equal to or better than those of non-texters.”
“Teenage texters are not stupid,” says Crystal. But what they lack is a sense of “the consequences of what they are doing, in the eyes of society as a whole…. They need to know when textisms are effective and when they are not. They need to appreciate the range of social reactions which texting, in its various forms, can elicit. This knowledge is slowly acquired from parents, peers, text etiquette websites, and (in the narrow sense) teachers. Teenagers have to learn to manage tis new behavior, as indeed do we all. For one thing is certain: texting is not going to go away in the foreseeable future.”
And as Louis Menand would say, it’s all about getting results faster:
“[T]here is no penalty for abruptness in a text message. Shortest said, best said. The faster the other person can reply, the less you need to say. Once, a phone call was quicker than a letter, and face-to-face was quicker than a phone call. Now e-mail is quicker than face-to-face, and texting, because the respondent is almost always armed with his or her device and ready to reply, is quicker than e-mail.”
at
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/10/20/081020crbo_books_menand?currentPage=all
A.J. Sutter - October 20, 2008 at 8:10 pm
I think such debates may suffer from treating the Net (i) too digitally (“good” or “bad”) and (ii) too monolithically (lumping email, chat, Web, etc. all together).
Yes, email (and Skype) can be a great form of communication for families. But in business it has plenty of minuses, as well as pluses. And if the Menand argument suggests that email may be better than face-to-face because it’s quicker, I do think this is flat-out wrong, at least if email is used as a substitute for, rather than supplement to, in-person interaction.
OTOH, Web surfing can have an ambivalent or even negative effect on families. For example, in pre-Web days, I used to spend more time together with my (then) spouse, perhaps watching some TV program I wasn’t so interested in, or perhaps negotiating over what we should watch. But even if I were sitting next to her reading the paper, we were spending some time together. Now, either my wife or I am more likely to be in a separate room online for at least a big chunk of the evening. For many families with kids, this atomization is probably even more marked.
The Internet is a bundle of technologies, each with different anthropological, intellectual, etc. impacts. Until more commentators take that into account, these “good/bad” debates will remain little more than journalistic or academic fluff.
Danielle Citron - October 21, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Thank you to you both for enriching the discussion on this one!
Leave a Reply