What the Internet does to the mind and self

One of the best things I’ve read on the subject of what the Internet does to our mental processing and social interactions is Adam Gopnik’s The information, How the Internet gets inside us. It was published in The New Yorker and is currently not behind a pay-wall.

Gopnik discusses the work of a number of writers, including the books Cognitive Surplus, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, The Shallows, Hamlet’s BlackBerry, Alone Together, and Too Much to Know. He divides the thinking of these writers into three categories: Never-Better, Better-Never, and Ever-Waser.

The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.

Gopnik’s writing is inspired, as in the end of this passage:

[T]he Ever Wasers smile condescendingly at the Better-Nevers and say, “Of course, some new machine is always ruining everything. We’ve all been here before.” But the Better-Nevers can say, in return, “What if the Internet is actually doing it?” The hypochondriac frets about this bump or that suspicious freckle and we laugh—but sooner or later one small bump, one jagged-edge freckle, will be the thing for certain. Worlds really do decline. “Oh, they always say that about the barbarians, but every generation has its barbarians, and every generation assimilates them,” one Roman reassured another when the Vandals were at the gates, and next thing you knew there wasn’t a hot bath or a good book for another thousand years.

I found this next observation insightful. It relates to the offensive behavior so common on the Internet.

What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own. (I’ve felt this myself, writing anonymously on hockey forums: it is easy to say vile things about Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the N.H.L., with a feeling of glee rather than with a sober sense that what you’re saying should be tempered by a little truth and reflection.) Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.

A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.

Reading Gopnik’s article prompted me to consider spending less time on the Internet – he and his family try to take a break one day a week. Unfortunately, the undeniably addictive quality of being online quickly displaced that thought. But the idea is now firmly implanted in the back of my mind for future consideration.

There’s a New Yorker online chat with the author here.

Resources:

Image: Trends Updates

Adam Gopnik, The information, How the Internet gets inside us, The New Yorker, February 14, 2011

Adam Gopnik, Ask the Author Live: Adam Gopnik on the Internet, The New Yorker, February 16, 2011