What the Internet is Doing to Your Brain & The World After Midnight March 8, 2011

Update 14 March: the talk that Nicholas Carr gave at the John Adams institute can be found here.

I went and saw Nicholas Carr speak about his book, “The Shallows” at the John Adams Institute last week. Carr’s book explores the impact of everything Internet on the human brain and on our behaviors and interactions.

Carr makes an eloquent case that something is happening to brains that are continually “jacked into the ‘Net.”  Are we simply learning how to integrate and order communication and data technologies into our personal and social patterns or, as Carr suggests tongue-in-cheek, are we rendering ourselves stupid through perpetual and compulsive Internet-spawned distractions? In losing our ability to focus on one task for a protracted length of time – and reading in particular – Carr implies that we are blunting deeper thought processes that lead to insights and the creation of knowledge.

Some statistics are dramatic in terms of average screen time versus book page read time, average time spent per web page and email inbox glances per hour. Reconfirmation of the end of books and publishing?  Nancy McKinstry, CEO of Wolters Kluwer and a panelist,  piped up to say no, not so – the Internet is a boon to her business and the world as it provides an agile conduit to ever increasing exabytes of content.

This is a remarkable turnaround in perception for the established publishing industry. Since its arrival on the scene, the Internet has been a source of terror for traditional publishing in all shapes and forms, from content to fulfillment. So I got my money’s worth just from that juxtaposition of ideas.

In a partial rebuke to Carr, there is learning going on if a publishing giant has figured out how to successfully channel part of the Internet information explosion. But I nod my head in personal recognition of the distractions which the Internet brings. I spend a lot of time on-line to, ultimately, my own frustration because there is just so much to sort through and digest. And I don’t want to miss anything. So, I often prefer to get a little of a lot over the Web than a lot of a little, as from a book.

But are our brains actually being rewired to the extent  that we are losing cognitive capability? — maybe we are just learning to adapt our behavior and learning styles to the madness around us. The Web is still in its infancy; the trail of creative destruction and changing digital consumption habits over the past 10 years points more the what we at Pentacle call “The World After Midnight” than a radical change in human neurobiology.

As Mr. Carr says, he doesn’t actually know either. He is just reflecting on his own experiences as someone caught in the throes of the Internet’s birth as opposed to those from the current generation raised on the Web since infancy. I suspect we need to wait before coming to a conclusion.