The
Atlantic
, July/August
2008
"Dave, stop. Stop,
will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads
with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene
toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman,
having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is
calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial
brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I
can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years
I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering
with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind
isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking
the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.
Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would
get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend
hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case
anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I
get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as
if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. 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, searching and surfing and
sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a
godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or
periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches,
some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote
I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging
in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines
and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from
link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened,
hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a
universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my
eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to
such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely
described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s
Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that
boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the
1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff
of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems
to be doing is chipping away 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. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of
words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my
troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of
them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web,
the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of
the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who
writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading
books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious
book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer:
“What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has
changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has
changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use
of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his
mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb
a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A
pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan
Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation
with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality,
reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources
online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted.
“I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or
four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still
await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide
a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently
published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University
College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the
way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars
examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular
research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K.
educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and
other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites
exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another
and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read
no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would
“bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but
there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors
of the study report:
It is clear
that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are
signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse”
horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet,
not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be
reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our
medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a
different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not
only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at
Tufts
University
and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading
Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of
reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and
“immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of
deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made
long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we
tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret
text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and
without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading
, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched
into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate
the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or
other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play
an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments
demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental
circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those
of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across
many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive
functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We
can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be
different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882,
Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be
precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had
become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been
forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it
up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered
touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of
his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work.
One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his
writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.
“Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the
friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in
music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our
writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway
of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler,
Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to
puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable.
People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed
among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the
time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s
not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow
Institute for Advanced Study at
George
Mason
University
, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely
break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds,
“has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it
functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has
called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental
rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the
qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common
use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and
Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how
the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief
in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The
“abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for
both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring
into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took
something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed
in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to
Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread
use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older
one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the
basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat,
to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started
obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual
technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves
to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their
brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have
come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes,
neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s
plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly
far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British
mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time
existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the
function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re
seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is
subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map
and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our
telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is
re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with
hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the
content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail
message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the
latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention
and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges
of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy
quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new
expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines
and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd
their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The
New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition
to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the
“shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s
news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages
and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the
new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many
roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the
Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s
been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s
intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time
that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named
Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant
in
Philadelphia
and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of
the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited
a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and
recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the
machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps
and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of
precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each
worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime,
claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the
factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of
the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and
its philosopher.
Taylor
’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call
it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around
the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output,
factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure
the jobs of their workers. The goal, as
Taylor
defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific
Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best
method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science
for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied
to all acts of manual labor,
Taylor
assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of
industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past
the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be
first.”
Taylor
’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial
manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and
software coders wield over our intellectual lives,
Taylor
’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is
a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and
manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on
finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every
mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s
headquarters, in
Mountain View
,
California
—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced
inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt,
is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is
striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of
behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it
carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business
Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly
control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What
Taylor
did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is
“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines
as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back
exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of
commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with
industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and
the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page,
the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in
computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their
search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be
connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as
smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For
us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004
interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the
world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain
that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told
a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial
intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an
admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their
disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A
fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use
technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been
solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there.
Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all
“be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an
artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is
the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be
isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when
we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation.
Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain
is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard
drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as
high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the
Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we
surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more
opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us
and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial
Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind
as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these
companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought.
It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a
worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress,
there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In
Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He
feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the
knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one
of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become
forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of
information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very
knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be
“filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates
wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but
he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and
reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human
knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in
the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist
Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to
intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.
Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine
religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread
sedition and debauchery. As
New York
University
professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing
press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to
imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my
skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or
nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds
will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then
again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing
press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that
a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we
acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those
words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the
sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation,
for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and
analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is
indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up
with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves
but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently
described what’s at stake:
I
come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the
complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and
articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a
personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
[But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner
density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information
overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of
dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into
“‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast
network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What
makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to
the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark,
its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it.
I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of
innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that
characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an
almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if
they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001,
people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be
a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely
on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own
intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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