Has Internet changed the way we read, think, learn and discuss? 

Pre-Internet Era

Before the ascent of Internet into public space, the access to information and knowledge was limited for a person. If a person had to acquire knowledge, there was a series of steps to be followed. In the pre-printing press era, knowledge was preserved in the minds and works of learned humans. To acquire knowledge, one must find a learned individual who is well-versed on the subject. Once such an expert is found, ample effort must be put to reach out to that individual. Sometimes, despite all the efforts, one fails to reach the expert. Reaching out isn’t sending a letter or a messenger towards him or her but rather involves leaving your home and family to a new place for a time unknown all for the pursuit of knowledge.

Fast forward to 16th century, thanks to Gutenberg, the world witnessed a literary revolution something of which was never heard of until then: The invention of printing press. Now, a new era was to begin in the possession of knowledge. Rather than knowledge being scattered to a few meagre individuals that are learned, printing press allowed reproduction of this knowledge for the masses. Gradually, the role of learned individuals at the top of hierarchy fell down and printed material took its place. As developments took on the printed world, books took over the role of preserving and transferring knowledge within the walls and shelves of libraries. Anyone who had the privilege to access a library could gather the information he or she needs. There was no longer a need to leave your family and homeland for the sake of knowledge (however the development of printing press and libraries were not globalised and all the communities didn’t have the resources or privilege to have them).

Knowledge For Anyone Anywhere At Anytime.

Books and printed material took over the world. And they remained at the top of the pedestal until Berns-Lee invented the next big thing: World Wide Web. An automated software developed in 1989 for sharing of information between scientists and institutes throughout the world. However, soon the world was to witness a revolution in knowledge and information like none before: the emergence of Internet and the development of smartphones. The new invention was so powerful that it challenged the heirarchy of knowledge unlike anything else in the past. Information was no longer restricted to the big libraries containing large books. The authority of learned individuals were put to question. With over 1.7 billion websites, information about anything reached the fingertips of anyone at anytime from anywhere around the world.

However, as we enter the third decade of the “Internet Era”, we are now starting to realise the detrimental effects of this revolution. In our previous blog, “Internet, Information and Ignorance”, we discussed about how Internet gave birth to illusory expertise and made public discussions futile. In this article, let’s discuss how Internet has influenced our abilities to read, think and interact with others as a whole.

Google is Smart and Informed, But Not You

Let’s go back to the pre-Internet era. If you are someone who has the hobby of reading (Even though reading is likely to be more of a habit than a hobby in a world without smartphones), you will have to visit your nearest library (sometimes, the nearest library maybe present in the town hundred miles from yours). You may have to look after shelves upon shelves to find the one book you are looking for. And these books don’t occupy their places in those shelves easily. They will atleast have gone through a basic negotiation process under authors, publishers and reviewers. Not everyone with a pen and paper could have made their work into those shelves easily. Even if they did, reviewers and readers brought out the truth of the low quality work outside.

This very act of visiting a library and carefully picking up books was within itself an education. One had to socialise and seek help from a librarian who possess higher chances of having the knowledge regarding the quality of books. The task of finding books itself and the act of reading and re-reading them involves a positive neocortical stimulation. In short, the entire process of visiting a library was by itself an intellectual stimulation. Moreover, the books that you have in your hand is less likely to be bogus as well.

But where do we stand now? Search engines like Google have replaced our libraries. The information available is instantaneous. However, there is neither a librarian nor a publisher to review the book. While knowledge and articulation were the prerequisite for an author in the pre-internet era, all you need to become an author in the world of internet is a keyboard. As National Journal’s Ron Fournier has said, in the age of the Internet, “every bigot is a publisher.” It is interesting yet threatening to realize how the act of reading has decayed among the new generation of people with the advent of Internet. Worse off, these people believe themselves to have more knowledge and expertise than the previous generations. It’s high time we realise that its Google who is smart and not ourselves.

The Downfall: From Enlightment to Entitlement

While reading was meant for enlightenment and learning in the past, the modern day reader on the Internet reads to strengthen their views and biases. To look intellectual seems to be more important than being one for the modern reader. A study conducted by a group of scientists at Yale points out to this shift in approach to reading. They found out that “people who search for information on the Web emerge from the process with an inflated sense of how much they know—even regarding topics that are unrelated to the ones they Googled.” This culture creates an environment where laypeople feel entitled to be treated as experts. As Tom Nicholas states in his book, “Internet is actually changing the way we read, the way we reason, even the way we think, and all for the worse. We expect information instantly. We want it broken down, presented in a way that is pleasing to our eye—no more of those small-type, fragile textbooks, thank you—and we want it to say what we want it to say”.

We ourselves experience the weakening of our ability to read these days. When I was small, we used to read a fiction book borrowed from our school library every week. Those books had roughly two hundred pages. But as I write this article, it now takes for me several weeks to complete a 300 page book. Internet has altered my (and probably your) reading ability by decreasing our attention span. The deficit in attention span caused by indulging in Internet 24×7 has affected the general public socially, psychologically and physically. On his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr quotes about Bruce Friedman, a pathologist at Michigan Medical School and a blogger, who spoke about his altered reading habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print. 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.”

Maryanne Wolf, the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, warns us that Internet will make us “mere decoders of information”. The art of deep thinking which comes from deep reading (Wolf says that they both are indistinguishable from each other) will be lost in the new age of instantaneous and efficient reading. Reading as in the traditional sense is not about brushing through words as it is now. The act of reading from books and printed materials activates our neocortex a lot. The traditional style of reading involves contemplation, forming associations, imagining storylines and characters and developing the ability to think beyond the words. As Nicholas Carr tells us, “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”.

But how far have we degraded ourselves in our reading abilities? Is there anything worse than brushing off a long article on the web without deep reading? Well, not brushing through the whole article completely once is worse than taking a quick scan on the web. But one may ask who does that? Let’s see:

The Death Of Reading: Power Browsing

In his book, “The Death of Expertise “, Tom Nicholas quotes the inferences from a study conducted by the University of Cambridge, London. According to the study, Internet users do not actually read the content or article they come across. Yes, you read that right. Instead, they “power browse” through the title, description and pictures looking for instantaneous information. They read through the first few sentences off a long article yet come out with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. “It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” But why do people do that?

To understand why, we must understand how the continuous consumption of information from a source like Internet affects our mind.

Attention, Advertisement and Article

The problems associated with the Internet do not arise from a single factor. Rather, several factors act synergistically to produce the full blown effect. These factors predominantly include the ones that we have focused a lot so far: spontaneity, availability, accessibility, lack of regulation, confirmation bias and so on. A reader may be curious to know how all of these add up to produce the final effect.

Let’s say we want to learn about hair fall. The moment we type “how to” in Google search bar, the search engine provides us with a set of options that is projected towards us after processing several information collected from its users involving complex algorithms and AI. This is our first point of distraction. Some people lose their track in this very moment and end up searching for other options which solve their other issues such as “how to sleep well at night”. Some of the users get caught in a transient amnesia wherein they forget what they came for in the midst of all these recommendations. We have all experienced such transient amnesia at some point.

However, the distractions don’t end there. Rather, we have now entered our search page. Google now recommends us with thousands of sources of information regarding not just our main topic, but also about other “related” topics some of which are totally irrelevant and in reality unrelated to what we are actually seeking for. This is where the role of catchy headlines and meta descriptions come to play. This is also the place where “power browsing” emerges. The user power browses through the titles within seconds. Our brain gets caught up in the enormous amount of information that has reached its desk to process. The mere idea that we-found-a-solution to our problem gives us a sense of enlightenment.

The user then quickly selects the article or page with the title that matches with his or her internal question: how to prevent hairfall. Moreover, this Page must be within the top five results of the search engine. After all, if the search engine cared enough to put them at the top, the information must be authentic. However, our brains have also power browsed through similar titles of other articles. Our mind cannot neglect the other articles which made it to the top. The search engine did care enough to put them at the top as well. This brings us to our second distraction: I must try to gaze through other articles as well even though I live in a fast world with no time available.

The user then gazes through the title and the first few sentences of the article and creates a vague and often inappropriate conclusion of the content they have consumed. He or she then proceeds into the next article in a hurry and this instantaneous act of power browsing continues over and over again. Moreover, one must realise that an article doesn’t just contain words and ideas. When one “reads” through an article in the modern sense, he or she encounters a WhatsApp notification from their best friend or an advertisement about the latest deals on Flipkart on the sidebar. Each of these newly popped up notifications act as a point of distraction to the user.

We must also realize how Internet has revolutionised traditional media such as newspapers, radios and television. These sources of information had to change their outlook and presentation to be in the race to satisfy a generation of get-everything-quick people. Newspapers have reduced their article length and filled up their pages with advertisements. News channels on television are now more entertaining and dramatic to watch than ever before. Like Nicholas Carr stated: “Never has a communication 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”.

Pommer’s Law: From No Opinion To Wrong Opinion

We have seen how distractions catch hold of an Internet user. Now, let’s ask ourselves: have we learnt how to prevent hairfall with all these articles and advertisements? The answer would be yes and no. There will definitely be a group of people who would have benefited from all those reading. But what about the remaining group of people? How large is the remaining group of people? Do they number in thousands or do they form the major bulk of those who surf in the World Wide Web?

Considering the Sturgeon’s Law which we discussed on our previous blog along with the “search engine manipulation” effect and the power browsing, the majority is likely to fall in the bucket of ignorance. They are less likely to have benefited from all those “Reading”. Worse off, some of them end up having false information and ideas about hair fall than before. This happens because people fail to distinguish what they already know and what they have gazed as they flash through the search results. This has rightly given birth to Pommer’s Law: Accessing Internet can change a person from having no opinion to wrong opinion.

The UCL study suggested that this is because the users “have unsophisticated mental maps of what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that it is a collection of networked resources from different providers,” and so they spend little time actually “evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority. Nicholas Carr also says something similar about himself: “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”.

Conclusion : The End Game

Before we conclude let’s analyse the bigger picture which has started to unfold now after three decades of Berns-Lee’s remarkable invention.

In general, people have become less patient, less social and less likely to speak to people they disagree with. Internet gave birth to keyboard warriors who are ready to cross all limits and ethical boundaries of moral discourse to publish things which they would never had the guts to say in real. The growing polarization thanks to the distance and anonymity of the Internet is killing our ability to read, think, discuss and build human relationships.

The writer Andrew Sullivan rightly sums us about the Internet culture:

And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin.

Tom Nicholas warns us in “The Death of Expertise”:

The Internet is the largest anonymous medium in human history. The ability to argue from a distance, and the cheapened sense of equality it provides, is corroding trust and respect among all of us, experts and laypeople alike. Alone in front of the keyboard but awash in websites, newsletters, and online groups dedicated to confirming any and every idea, the Internet has politically and intellectually mired millions of Americans in their own biases.