In his recent book “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains”, Nicholas Carr examines the cognitive and cultural effects the Internet is having on our brains. The irony is that, if his arguments prove to be correct, it is unlikely you will be able to complete reading the book anyway.
This set me thinking about how our reading habits have changed from days when we consumed news on a paper that left our fingers tainted black and books that could be used as doorstops. Think back to those days when your schoolbag used to weigh as much Ricky Januarie, laden with text books and Hardy Boys novels from the library. Now compare that to today’s “learners” that cut and paste Wikipedia posts and only need to download the latest iPhone app to reveal stolen answers to this year’s matric exams. Even teenage love letters have now been replaced by short bursts of MXit “sexting”.
I would best describe my attention span is “ADD”. But thinking back, it didn’t always used to be this way.
I used to believe that the decline in my concentration skills could be traced back to my third year tax lecturer’s monotonic attempts at a natural cure for insomnia. But now, as I gaze at my browser with its three open tabs, email notifications pinging mercilessly for attention in the background and my BBM light flashing red yet again, I realise Nicholas Carr may just have a point.
Reading a book in bed has been replaced with checking Dow Jones live prices on my Bloomberg app or checking the latest Protea score online (very good when they’re winning). In fact, I need to make a concentrated effort just to read a book nowadays - and it generally occurs only when I’m overseas where roaming data rates can tear you a new, ahem, hole in your wallet.
Alas, my once sponge-like memory that could recite the entire length of “Caddyshack” and “The Three Amigos” or recall a girl’s cellphone number from the drunken haze of the night before is no more. I have gone from being first choice at 30 Seconds and Trivial Pursuit to relying on games of Twister to display my boardgame prowess.
And I blame it all on this Internet devil.
Part of the problem is easiest explained if you can imagine that your brain’s memory is broken into two parts, short-term and long-term. The short-term (RAM) memory stores all the stuff that needs to be kept handy for use in the, well, short-term. For example, what time the next Bafana game kicks off. The long-term (Hard Drive) memory stores the stuff we don’t usually need as often or in the near term. Like the wife’s birthday or that Luca Pacioli invented the double entry accounting system in 1494.
We now find ourselves in a situation where the sheer volume of data required to be processed by our RAM has increased tenfold. This, coupled with the lack of opportunity to focus our attention on a single task for a lengthy period of time, means it’s hardly rocket science to conclude that the way we now consume information can affect our ability to process and recall information.
By now, most of The Daily Maverick’s readers are familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” theory, where, to become a world-beating expert in your field, you need to engage in a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice in your vocation. According to Gladwell, natural talent alone is not enough to succeed at the highest level.
What this demonstrates is the effect of repetition on the neural patterns in our brains. Each thought (or action arising as a result of thought) is like a little pathway being cleared in the jungle forest of our brains. And the more we repeat that thought (tread that pathway), the more ingrained and pronounced it becomes. Unfortunately, this means that those irritating sports coaches and helicopter parents were right: Practice does indeed make perfect.
Where does this leave the future generation? If the argument holds that the Internet is indeed dumbing us down, what does the future hold for technological advances and creations? Will the pessimists be proved correct and a world that already possesses dangerously low levels of literacy be pushed further into the abyss? Or will the world continue its unabated course of technological advancement, as we did previously, when the calculator merely changed which parts of our brains we used when performing mathematical calculations.
I can already hear the naysayers highlighting the irony that I am writing about how the Internet is making us stupid, only to have the story published online. The difference is that, just as there are good and bad bacteria, there is also good and bad Internet. At The Daily Maverick we like to think we fall into “great” category where you notice large, crisp, storytelling pictures with each witty and entertaining bit of news reporting and writing. You will not notice 10 flashing adverts or a plethora of hyperlinks slicing the Achilles tendons of your attention span. Our philosophy is that the Internet is an incredible development in the history of mankind, but there are some aspects of it that the humanity just didn’t get right. Online news is one of them and every day we work relentlessly to correct the course on which the news machines set their exploratory sails.
So the next time you manage to remember your anniversary or where you put your car keys, remember, cheques are appreciated, but no need to thank us, we’re just doing our jobs!
We must be available 24/7 to answer the cellphone or e-mail no matter that it could wait, or how dumbass and irrelevant it is. Everywhere must have some background noise. Often called music, but that's only an opinion. And not mine.
Emails must be answered immediately, otherwise the sender phones to ask if we received it, and why haven't we responded yet. Work is a continually increasing round of deadlines, requests for updates, reports and increasingly pointless and trivial exercises. Orchestrated by the one known as "here comes the bastard now".
Switch your phone off, lose it or just throw it away, and within ten minutes your nearest and dearest are busy checking police stations, hospitals and the local mortuary for your lifeless remains.
There is no need to remember anything, they'll phone, twitter, SMS or email anyway, hence short-term memory is shagged through lack of use.
We are also overwhelmed by continual visual and aural stimuli, mostly advertising or trivia or both. In short, just plain rubbish.
I was at the airport today. The best place to be treated like a toddler.
I used a lift. In the less than 20 seconds of the one floor ride, (yes I am lazy), I was advised to press the button for the floor I wanted, warned to beware of the doors closing, given about 15 bars of Fur Elise, told I had arrived and warned to beware of the doors opening. For Dog's sake, who needs instructions on how to use a lift. And have 15 bars of Fur Elise played by an untrained baboon on a Casio one octave electronic piano recommended as suitable for the ages 3-5.
Next, some uniformed idiot approached and asked if they could direct me to the check-in departures area. All the while standing under a big sign which said Departures and bore a large arrow pointing off towards the counters about 10 metres away. Which had a big sign above them saying "Check-In".
You can't even have a crap in peace because the building itself has a PA system which broadcasts anodyne Europop directed by an acephalic protozooid with a lukewarm IQ and an almost American accent. Or perhaps a computer system cobbled together from a call centre answering system. A depressed parrot sits pressing away while listening to "For the Back Passage Boys press 1, Val Doonican press 2, Mantovani press 3............."
I won't even mention the Secuity pantomime.
The plane is no better. If you can't work out how to use a seat belt, does mummy dress you and should you be out unaccompanied anyway.
At some point your cerebral cortex thinks bugger this, that's enough of this nonsense and switches off to wait for something worth responding to. No wonder the world seems to suffer from ADD, folk are force fed continuous marketing, most of which is pitched at learning disadvantaged 7 year-olds.
Again, there is no need to remember anything because most of it is crap and has a micro-second half-life. Your brain is wasting away from underuse as it is fed a continual diet of cerebral Senekot.
Perhaps HG Wells was right, we are mutating into the Morlocks and Eloi.