I notice that I correspond with more people but at less depth. I notice that it is possible to have intimate relationships that exist only on the Net and have little or no physical component. I notice that it is even possible to engage in complex social projects, such as making music, without ever meeting your collaborators. I am unconvinced of the value of these. (Brian Eno p. 126).
I find this quote to be a pretty clear representation of an age-old way of thinking. However, I believe that the intention of the author was to express the depth in which they are able to interact with people while maintaining a digital barrier between them. They express a level of concern with this, as it seems that such a barrier somehow decreases the value of the interaction to the author. However, they do not seem to express any justification for their dissatisfaction.
One pre-internet memory I had existed during the internet boom, but before my family had a computer in the house. I was watching a re-run of Good Will Hunting with my mom in the living room. I could not have been more than 5 at the time, but I had this fascination with intelligent people and what made them tick. While watching the movie, there were tons of scenes including complicated mathematical figures and expressions. Being a 5-year-old, I had absolutely no idea what it all meant, but I had to know why these people were mixing numbers with letters with what looked like a different language entirely (it wound up being greek). At the time, we had no access to Google or any other indexing service, so after begging my mom for a couple of days, she took me to the library where I checked out a book on basic algebra. Again, I was only 5, so none of this made any sense to me, but at the time it was the only way I could look at all the fascinating math figures. The fascinating part being that I had a stutter that was pretty bad at the time, so I struggled with interacting with people. Because of this, my mom made sure I walked right up to the librarian and asked to get a book on math. What a concept. Asking another individual to get information on a topic that you know nothing about. I had to work to get the information I wanted, and in all likelihood, the information I was going to get want going to be relevant(or understood for that matter). As an individual, young as I may have been, it had the limited to inquire into my curiosities at the rate at which I could pull books from a shelf. The information I wanted was tucked away between the pages of books that were often 50+ years old. If I wanted answers, I needed patience. This, no doubt would be an outlook that writers like Douglas Rushkoff would take to like a moth to a light. There seems to be a belief that the easy way is no longer the right way. If everything is just handed to you, then surely you are being spoiled in that endeavor and you will be worse off in the long run. While Rushkoff does speak from his own experience (and I respect him greatly for this), this argument is one that scales across all recorded history. A good example of this was during the breakthrough of affordable, mass-produced paper in schools. There were many elder-scholars that saw this creation as a luxury that would lead to lazy students who never needed to endure the chalk-on-slate method. Surely, they thought, that such simplicity and ease would cause students to be more frivolous and lead them down a path towards conclusions that are jumped to. With that in mind, would I have been a better off thinker had I been granted access to Google at such a young age? Perhaps. But I can speak to the advancements it has allowed me to achieve while studying at the University of Maine.
Fast forward to April of this year, I was held up in the library with three of my classmates studying for at least 9 hours for our Calculus final the next day. Yes, we were in a library, but we didn’t touch a single book that entire time. Any questions we had were either parsed into a Google Search or reduced out of a 6-year-old YouTube video that wasn’t in English. The answer to every question, in as much detail, from as many sources as we wanted was only 10 clicks away at the most. How does this make me feel? Blessed. In an age where information is nearly infinitely accessible, I feel blessed to have that access. I can imagine that 40 years ago if I were taking a Calculus final and ran into a really tricky problem, I would wind up having to scrub through many books and chapters within those books to find a semblance of what might help solve it. In that respect, it is possible that the process of scrubbing through all that information may enable me to experience a much wider scope of the material, but I would also argue that wasting all that time is surely not going to help on the exam. It is a double-edged sword, but one edge is far sharper than the other. Many will argue that laziness and impatience will come from the instant gratification that the internet has cultivated for us. Many will also argue that such instant gratification will enable us to be more present in our thinking. To be able to focus on the moment, rather than dwell on the happenings of the past, or the possibilities of the future would be a blessing if done properly. The question of the internet’s place in this balance is whether or not this will lend to a more educated community of inquisitive thinkers, or a more redundant and repetitive mindset of individuals who don’t rely on their own knowledge, when anything they need to know can be pulled out of the cloud faster than out of their hippocampus.
The Internet Makes Me Think in the Present Tense – Douglas Rushkoff
“How does the Internet change the way I think? It puts me in the present tense. It’s as if my cognitive resources are shifted from my hard drive to my RAM. That which is happening right now is valued, and everything in the past or future becomes less relevant.
The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.
And as a result, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.”
REPLACING EXPERIENCE WITH FACSIMILE – Anthony Aguirre
“As visual artists, we might rephrase the question as something like: How has the Internet changed the way we see?
For the visual artist, seeing is essential to thought. It organizes information and how we develop thoughts and feelings. It’s how we connect.
So how has the Internet changed us visually? The changes are subtle yet profound. They did not start with the computer. The changes began with the camera and other film-based media, and the Internet has had an exponential effect on that change.”
HELL IF I KNOW – Gregory Paul
“Being among those who have predicted that humans will be uploading their minds into cybermachines in the not too distant future, one might assume I’m enthusiastic about the Internet. But the thinking of my still primate mind about the new mode of information exchange is more ambiguous.
No doubt the Internet is changing the way I operate and influence the world around me. Type “gregory paul religion and society” into Google and nearly four million hits come up. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it looks impressive. An article in a Brit newspaper on my sociological research garnered over 700 comments. Back in the 20th century I could not imagine my technical research making such an impression on the global sociopolitical scene because the responsible mechanism – publishing in open access online academic journals – was not available. The new communication environment is undoubtedly altering my research and publicity strategy relative to what it would be in a less digital world. Even so, I am not entirely sure how my actions are being modified. The only way to find out would be to run a parallel universe experiment in which everything is the same except for the existence of an Internet type of communications, and see what I do in the alternative situation.”
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