I came across an interesting article in the June 4 Wall Street Journal by Clay Shirky entitled “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?” Although its roots lie in the journalistic tenet of raising questions ultimately too great or too ambiguous to answer, the growth of the argument had its own value in asking the world to recognize the genesis of a media culture too young to have boundaries and, even if they existed, too powerful to heed them.
Throughout the course of the essay, Shirky points out this new literary culture, while mediocre in mean quality, has provided the tools for us to channel our “cognitive surplus” to create vast networks of human cooperation. Nice. After all, who doesn’t use Wikipedia? But for fear of sounding prosaic, let’s talk about the question in the adversarial sense. Again, with a twist: Does the Internet make us stupid?
What does it take for an idea to become powerful? In the most base sense, I’d have to say consensus. As soon as one conceives an idea, whether right or wrong, hurtful or not, it only takes another like-minded person for the idea to become forceful. Even before rationality kicks in, an appeal to any semblance of an individual’s resentment, fear, passion or ego, cements the idea in the culture of our time. Most of us have done it through the Internet.
Message boards, status updates, blog comments; the Internet is, essentially, nothing more than a battleground of passion disguised as an intellectual colloquy. It is unfettered by standards of publication; it laughs at formality, gives the finger to coherency, purpose and logic. It is a cesspool of malformed concepts floating on a grimy layer of humanity’s languish for self-promulgation.
Does the Internet make us stupid? At the very least, it helps. Think the Earth is flat? You can find solace from the centuries of experimentation, physical verification and the modern edifice of science as we know it by joining the Flat Earth Society.
Think the government is run by reptilians and want to learn how praying to God can help reveal them to you? Try educate-yourself.org. Information and knowledge have been mutated by the illusion of truth through consensus. Tangible, empirical or even logical evidence is only optional.
To be realistic, it’s not the Internet that makes us stupid — it’s people. Obviously, we don’t blame being shot on the gun, so why is the Internet the target of my criticism? Let me digress: I love the Internet. Viral videos make me laugh, spam is silly and the social dimension of my life has never been more immediate. Less superficially, there are many online information systems I use and on which I depend. It’s a daunting task to want to claim that the Internet — as Shirky does — can make anyone smarter by merely being a tool of mass collaboration. I use these tools, but I do so because I knew they existed before I used them. I know the standards of their publications and the formalities required to be considered legitimate. It is this systematization that makes the Internet useful and, therefore, me smarter.
But people, once finding unanimity in their ideas, give little care as to where the information comes from as long as they aren’t alone. Maybe it’s not the idea of mass collaboration being a method of rationality and truth, but instead the spectrum extending both ways: Toward knowledge as well as toward stupidity. The real question is whether or not humans have the natural capacity to distinguish which way they’re headed.
I want to be an optimist. I want to think people have the awareness to question their ill-based notions before pouring their ideas onto the Internet. In the end, to answer the question: No. It makes us neither smarter nor more stupid, the Internet is just another tool. It is proof that humanity — at times questionably — is headed toward some future state of truth and knowledge in its wanting of a global — or should I say lateral — stage for the discussion of ideas.
Nicholas Earl is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at earlnich@msu.edu.
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