Have you ever thought about it? Surfing the web is a new and unique experience in humanity's history. Never before have we been given access to so much information and at such speed as today. The internet is fundamentally changing how we interact with each other and the world around us. What, specifically, does this mean for our brains, our thought patterns, and our culture?
The internet is perhaps the most influential invention ever contrived. The spread of ideas has long been the source of change in the world. Throughout history people have killed and been killed for the sake of spreading or halting information. The old sayings, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and “loose lips sink ships,” are testament to the power of ideas. A connection to the internet allows people to share and find ideas almost instantaneously. This means a lot of change can happen to societies very quickly. Political alliances can be forged through social networking. Scientists can share theories and data with each other very easily. Money can be exchanged and earned in new ways. Children in poor countries can benefit from the academic resources of wealthy nations. These are macroscopic effects, but changes to a single brain are microscopic in scope.
The brain is marvelously able to change its “wiring” in order to adapt to different environments. This plasticity allows people to adjust to new careers, learn to read, cope with blindness, and much more. As a person gets accustomed to using the internet, that person's brain “rewires” itself to interact more effectively with cyberspace. The internet is full of distractions, namely links and advertisements. It also makes being distracted very pleasing. Stray thoughts are easily pursued by opening additional browser tabs and using search engines. You could be right in the middle of reading a news article when you think about what tomorrow's weather will be like. A couple clicks later and you are dreading the impending snow storm. Then you go back to the article and try to remember where you left off. A few minutes later you think about checking your email and promptly do so. All along you might have been receiving and responding to text messages on your phone. From your perspective this may seem like harmless multitasking, but your brain is being spoiled by instant gratification. Over long periods of time, excessive internet use can make people generally impatient and prone to distraction. The brain learns that distractions are okay and interruptions are enjoyable. We like constant updates nowadays, but previous generations were accustomed to longer periods of sustained attention—focusing on each task until it was finished. For them, mail was received once a day or even less often. They read about topics one at a time and usually in some logical order. Today, reading on the internet is directed by the stream of consciousness, and topics can be quite random. Switching between multiple webpages will break a reader's concentration and increase the cognitive load. That means your brain must work harder to keep track of what you are reading, and less mental energy is used to absorb and process the information on those pages. In accordance with that change in behavior, the brain becomes better at managing multiple tasks and worse at reading comprehension.
Slow reading is good for maximizing the intellectual benefit of textual information. But information is no longer a scarce commodity. Rather than straining to get new information, we are now striving to contend with an overabundance of content. People are finding new ways to organize, search, and analyze the vast amounts of data provided by the internet. On a personal level, people tend to forgo slow reading and adopt skimming as their primary reading method. With so much content to absorb, it is difficult to slow down one's reading for fear of missing out on something. People learn about more varied topics, but they have only a passable understanding of each one. In this way, the internet makes more people “well-rounded,” but it subtly hinders any achievement of expertise by overfeeding us with content. Where does this copious content come from, anyway?
The internet creates a two-way stream of information. Not only can data be downloaded, but it can be uploaded, too. Every time someone sends a tweet, uploads a video, creates a blog post, edits a Wikipedia page, or updates a social networking profile, that person is contributing to internet content. Try to imagine one million YouTube users, and each one uploads a one minute video on the same day. In just one day, YouTube would have acquired one million minutes of video content. Without any interruptions (eating, sleeping, etc.), it would take someone almost two years to watch all those videos. Think about that!
All this exchange of content makes people dependent and addicted to internet use. The anguish some people experience when their internet connections fail, or when their cellphones are missing, is evidence of this. GPS devices in cars are great, but, when they do not work properly, many people can find themselves distressingly lost. Texting for some people has become so important that interrupting conversations and work is acceptable and commonplace. When the phone beckons, all must pause for a couple lines of text to be read and then answered. Such behavior would have been considered deplorable in the twentieth century, but nowadays it is rather normal.
For good or bad, the internet is helping extinguish many aspects of life from the last century. One of the most precious things would be free time for deep thinking. The Industrial Revolution made us more productive and efficient so we could have more time to spend on family, hobbies, etc. Now we cannot get enough work-hours to earn all the money we want. And when we are not at work, the internet tempts us with countless new things—videos, articles, games, messages. Sooner or later we have to squeeze in time for sleeping, although not enough for most of us. Where is the time for thinking? For daydreaming, meditating, getting a perspective on our lives? We are losing that time to the internet, much like earlier generations lost it to watching television. When there is time to just sit and think, many of us cannot stand it and languish for access to a computer. Spending time face-to-face with family members and friends is diminishing as well. Video on demand, texting, and other forms of personalized content use eliminate the need for shared experiences. Why watch television with your family when you can watch your shows any time you want on the internet. You no longer have to be in the same room with someone for conversation if you can text or video-conference with them. MP3 players make listening to radios and jukeboxes unnecessary.
What will future internet users be like? Without self-restraint, they will be even more impatient and easily distracted than today. Their writing will be painfully concise. Perhaps the average book's word count will go down. Textbooks, or curricula in general, will be customized excerpts from the online collection of all human knowledge. Nearly all of people's education will come from the internet, not parents and teachers. They will appear to live in separate worlds from an external observer. As they navigate physical environments, earphones let them listen to anything they want. Tiny screens let them see anything they want. And the internet gives them any information they might need in daily tasks. Using the internet as a second brain, they will appear much more knowledgeable and capable than us. They will be more productive because of their connection to cyberspace, but this augmentation will come at a cost. Future users will feel anxious whenever they are disconnected. Sleep deprivation will be a major health concern. The physical world will seem less real than the digital one. Take the internet away, and its users might struggle to cope even with mundane situations. With the internet, they may eventually seem omniscient.
Too much internet use reduces our ability to concentrate, and its distractions hinder the learning process. Depending on your point of view, that is okay because the internet holds more information than we could ever hope to absorb. We just need to make sure that relevant information is available whenever it is needed. Some old-fashioned moderation would protect our mental focus from significantly deteriorating. If we take the time to contemplate what we learn once in a while, then our brains should experience intellectual prosperity. So far we have seen a net benefit from the internet, and, hopefully, we will continue to adapt to our technologies without losing ourselves in the process.
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