It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

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With every change there’s a backlash, and I’ve noticed there’s a new form of Ludditism creeping into a lot of the stuff I read. The posture is that the internet is making us stupid and a new generation of lazy thinkers is coming through.

Over lunch today I read a piece by University of South Florida lecturer Bob Batchelor, Google and the End of Wisdom, and his opinion is:

“Poor critical thinking in college leads to substandard thinking as adults, not the kind of skills necessary in confronting global challenges. Thus, the reliance on Google and Wikipedia for quick answers in completing a college-level paper has ramifications. We are producing a generation of lazy thinkers who gleefully use the information easily access via technology as an excuse for shoddy cognitive abilities.

“Most students are not fond of the alternative. The antithesis of simple thinking is hard work based on reading, discussion, reflection, and creating new knowledge based on the accumulation of facts, and basically critiquing one’s own thinking. Instead of putting forth such effort, which is certainly difficult, today’s students use technology as a way of outsourcing their thinking – no questions asked.

“While early Web gurus believed the Internet would democratize the world and provide a democratic platform of critical thinking about the world and oneself, today’s students use the Web to surround themselves with people, brands, and topics that are compatible to their views. As such, students follow every move of their “friends” on Facebook or Tweet back and forth with people who are just like them and have the same worldviews. They are not challenged to consider another way of looking at and being in the world – they are missing a critical exercise in compassion. “

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Like a lot of people I’m having moments where the information abundance of my life is wearing a bit thin. It seems that many conversations are now playful competitions in distraction and overload. “My inbox is fuller than your inbox”.

I’ll admit that I’ve had fantasies of unplugging and perhaps taking up a new profession, like growing my own vegetables or stocking a cupboard with biros and writing my great novel in longhand.

But something rings strangely untrue about the “Google is dumbing us down” school of thought. It doesn’t describe me personally, but also it doesn’t seem to apply to anyone I know, young or old. It comes across like some kind of culture, cultivated in a laboratory, that dies as soon as it’s exposed to the real environment.

The people around me seem to be self-regulating the way they consume and use information, in a wide variety of ways. Some are in the slow lane, some are flying full-throttle down the superhighway. None of them seem to be suffering from “substandard thinking”.

I recently found the best description of my own personal relationship with information in a review by Ben Casnocha of Tyler Cowen’s book Create Your Own Economy. He says:

“I liken my information consumption patterns to eating at a churrascaria restaurant, the Brazilian style steakhouse where passadors (meat waiters) circle your table with knives and a skewer and offer fresh cuttings of filet mignon, lamb, duck, sausage, and more in unlimited quantities. The waiters know me well and recommend new cuts of meat. A hand-selected group of friends from all over the world join me at my table each night. They are outstanding conversationalists. At the churrascaria I eat, I drink, I debate, and I leave feeling not just full but deeply satisfied with the whole experience.

“The restaurant is my RSS reader (“Real Simple Syndication”) and the meat is the content flowing from my 120 subscriptions to websites or blogs. An RSS reader downloads the latest content from websites whenever they are updated and displays them in one application. The restaurant ambience, conversation, menu recommendations, and emotional satisfaction that settles in the stomach after a long meal with good friends: this is the social and interactive aspect to the Web.
In other words, my online information diet is diverse, highly personal, and comprised mostly of short bits that I consume one after another in rapid-fire fashion. And it all happens in about the same time it would take me to go through a daily newspaper.

“Self-education has gone from being like a loner sitting in a bar sparsely populated with hazily attractive women to being in the center of a packed, rocking night club where the women are wearing mini-skirts and the guys’ shirts open up several buttons down.

“Cowen refers to this process as the “daily self-assembly of synthetic experiences.” My inputs appear a chaotic jumble of scattered information but to me they touch all my interest points. When I consume them as a blend, I see all-important connections between the different intellectual narratives I follow—a business idea (entrepreneurship) in the airplane space (travel), for example. Because building the blend is a social exercise real communities and friendships form around certain topics my social life and intellectual life intersect more intensely than before. And I engage in ongoing self-discovery by reflecting upon my interests, finding new bits to add to my stream, and thinking about how it all fits together.”

It’s almost the exact opposite of the doom and gloom being theorised by thinkers like Bob Batchelor, but it rings far truer to me. Is all this multi-tasking and bit consuming making me think more or less? I can tell you unequivocally that it’s stretching my mind, intellectually and creatively, in more ways than it’s ever been stretched before.

I might be quite an extreme example, because I thrive on what Cowen calls the “autistic cognitive style” (collecting and organising information to an intense degree). But I look around at the people I know, all with their own cognitive styles and preferences, and I see that they’re all balancing their own level of focus or unfocus in their life. Their own personal blend of bits.

I don’t see people getting dumber, I see knowledge and cross-pollination of ideas exploding.

pic by creativespark: street art in Perth, Western Australia

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Filed under Creativity, Education, Urban Life, Web & Technology

Tags: information overload, RSS feeds, rss filters, Google, multitasking, Bob Batchelor, Tyler Cowen, Ben Casnocha, information consumption, neurodiversity, cognitive styles, autistic cognitive style, autism, information blends, deep thinking, critical thinking, wisdom, luddites