Three Wise Men on Technology, Humanity

Aaron Durlauf

The advent of the information age has given rise to new technologies with vast potential to change the way we live our lives. As with the rise of any new technology or movement, comes the debate about whether or not the inventions of the new digital world will be positive or negative. Three important voices in this debate are Nicholas Carr, a columnist for The Atlantic and a vocal critic of the effects that the internet has on our cognition, Jamais Cascio, another writer for The Atlantic who believes that the years to come will prove the digital age to be simply another step in the evolution of the human condition, and Clay Shirky a columnist for The Wall Street Journal who focuses on the vast potential of the internet and other digital technologies to connect people the world over.

Nicholas Carr, in his now lauded article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” begins his piece by praising the benefits that the internet has given the world. He quickly however posits that the internet and the way we use it causes us to search broadly rather than deeply, turning us from “deep sea scuba diver[s] in the sea of words,” to “guy[s] on a Jet Ski,” zipping around on the surface. Carr claims that as we’ve adjusted our cognitive style to the internet, we’ve lost our ability to read and think deeply. Although he admits that the neurological studies to back him up do not yet exist, Carr even goes so far as to suggest our usage of the net has even begun to restructure our neural pathways and significantly impact our cognition. Carr uses several sources to back him up, a London study on our style of reading articles online, playwright Richard Foreman, as well as a host of other authorities on the subject of thought and technology. While he bemoans the death of literature and deep thinking, Carr does not make it clear as to what he wants done about this problem as he sees it. Are we to abandon the internet? It seems to me as though one can’t put the genie back in the bottle so to speak, and that this change is inevitable.

Jamais Cascio has a different way of viewing the issue. Cascio applauds Carr’s thoughts on the subject as very insightful. He does not deny that there is a change in the way people think and the way people live their lives in the information age. Cascio begins his article, “Get Smarter” by discussing how the few thousand human families of the last ice age survived. “How did we cope?” Cascio writes, “By getting smarter.” Cascio goes on to describe the process of the coevolution of human society and cognition and man-made technologies. By elaborating on the many possible augmentations that the digital age could produce in the distant future, Cascio describes a future in which the standard for quality has changed from the depth and eloquence in literature to the breadth and efficiency, the far reaching influence of new technologically advanced media. He points out that at the dawn of the age of mass produced literature, there was no standard, no established culture to decide what was good and what was not; just as there is no standard for the new media of the 21^st century. But just as such a culture grew and evolved, so will it evolve for the internet, for social networking, for blogs.

Clay Shirky in his article, “Does the Internet Make You Smarter or Dumber” follows a similar chain of argumentation. He states that the chief innovation of the scientific revolution was the idea of peer review, that science was a collaborative effort. This idea of peer review brought about a new standard for science and literature. Thus the same mechanisms will refine the internet. Shirky concludes his article by speaking of the possible benefits of the internet. “The task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.”

What are we to make of these viewpoints we have before us? As my feelings and thoughts about this topic have evolved, I’ve come to the following conclusion: what makes us essentially human, what defines the human condition is not wrapped up in the technologies we use. Yes they play a vital role in our lives and shape many of our actions, but they are not what make us human, but rather byproducts of our essential humanity. The human condition means change, the human condition is about experiencing the breadth of emotions we’ve evolved to have. Whatever technologies we use, they will not mask our humanity, but rather serve as an expression of it.