Is the Internet Dangerous? (Part Two)
In this special three-part series, Soul Shelter asks: At what point does being wired, linked up, zoned in, and always connected become a disservice to ourselves and the culture around us? Is high-speed information-gathering destroying the inner life?
Last Monday’s post left off on the subject of youths born into an online world. Inevitably, today’s young people interpret reality, environment, history, culture, and value through the Internet’s pixelated prism. If Popularity = Value truly is the Internet’s chief law of discernment, what habits of mind does that inculcate in those with no memories of the pre-Internet world?
This concern has been much in the air of late. Some months ago the Los Angeles Times featured a prominent review of writer Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Bauerlein argues that the intellectual atmosphere of the Internet is one of information detrimentally streamlined. Consequently, instead of nurturing real curiosity and undertaking real inquiry, students reared in the Internet age adopt a kind of intellectual tunnel vision fixated on results and indifferent to substance. They “seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort. … Going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits.”
Similarly, the cover of the last July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly bore the bold
words, Is Google Making us Stoopid? : What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Writer Nicholas Carr began the piece with a confession:
I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. … And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
Carr’s article is interesting and well worth taking in, but his insights have their antecedents in an eloquent book which receives nary a mention in the Atlantic article — the second in my three-book profile…
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts. Published in 1998, well before Internet addiction became widespread, Birkerts’ book was astonishingly prophetic — and hence destined for the honorable obscurity allotted to things well ahead of their time. A decade ago Birkerts foresaw the ominous consequences in our rush to move our existences online:
Our lives are busy, distracted, multitracked, stressed. We may have altered our cognitive apparatus — speeding up, learning to deal with complex assaults of stimuli — in such a way that we can no longer take in the [printed] word [of literature] as it is meant to be taken in. …
While circuit and screen are ideal conduits for certain kinds of data — they are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness. …
Being online and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations. …
What I fear is a continued withering-away of [artistic and creative] influence. … My nightmare scenario is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference. I fear a world become sanitized and superficial.
Digital/Internet culture is collective or ‘horizontal,’ says Birkerts. It is a world of disembodiment, fragmentation, and abstraction, predicated entirely upon instantaneousness.
In contrast to our online mentality of today, says Birkerts, our pre-Internet mentality allowed for a greater number of deep, personal (‘vertical’), and cohesive experiences. For example, the old fashioned acts of reading or experiencing art entailed the “slow, painful, delicious excavation of the self.” Today, however, we are reducing — if not abandoning — these rich, subjective experiences. Instead, he says,
We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degree in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life. …
To me the wager is intuitively clear: we gain access and efficiency at the expense of subjective self-awareness. …
We have created invisible elsewheres that are as immediate as our actual surroundings. We have fractured the flow of time, layered it into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price. …
We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence.
The Gutenberg Elegies and Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine share an important central message, which, for all our connectedness in the Internet Age, is too rarely transmitted. It is this:
As our personal time becomes more and more ‘virtual,’ and enmeshed in 24-hour connectivity, our individuality — our very identity — comes under threat.
Sound alarmist? Perhaps, but consider that the psycho-physical experience of staring at a terminal is the same for everyone. Individuality, personality, and independent thought, on the other hand, are deeply conditioned by varied experience – no changing that. While information and ideas have a role in shaping us as individuals — and these are accessible through a computer terminal — alone they cannot sustain individuality.
Popular belief holds that the Internet’s democratization of information can liberate people. But can information, by itself, do such a thing? What if its power to do so is countered, if not ultimately dispelled altogether, by the dangerous flattening of psycho-physical experience produced in all of us by prolonged ‘screen-time’?
“Is the Internet Dangerous” concludes next Monday with discussion of a third book that touches upon mass culture and the Internet.
You might also enjoy:
“Is the Internet Dangerous? (Part One)”
“How to Start Unplugging From A Plugged-In Job”
