The Way

Curtis Lin

Cheryl Clarks

7/27/11

BU Summer – Persuasive Writing

The Changing Way – “Reworked”

A new era of digital technology has ushered in, bringing forth the internet. The internet is also becoming increasingly integrated into our lives as time passes. But with this new era of technology and communication, there are both critics and advocates of the occurring revolution.

For example, take Nick Carr, author of Is Google Making Us Stupid?, who questions whether the increasingly widespread usage of the internet is positive or negative. He argues that the internet, through its fast speed and high paced information relay, decreases the attention span, and changes our habits. He, however, while assuming that the internet does have its negative impact on the human mind, suggests that there may be an incredibly large amount of benefits that the internet may make for human kind, in which he often referred to past historical advancements, such as the development of printing press.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is an advocate of new technology, Jamais Cascio, author of Get Smarter, who emphasizes that the internet had just been born into the world, and its own developmental stage is that of an infant’s. Similar to Nick Carr, Cascio greatly supports his argument by referring to even further back at the dawn of man – and man’s incredible development of self-improvement until now. Cascio then encourages the reader to imagine the many possibilities that might be brought forth by development in technology – in which he supports these possibilities by the ability of humankind to develop themselves through new technology. Cascio also notes that humans have much intelligence, including those which are able to process multiple tendencies at once.

Clay Shirky, author of Does the Internet Make You Smarter or Dumber?, jumps into the fray of the war on internet usage, claiming that, similar to the development of books and movable type, the internet needs to be “experimented” upon and that the wave of internet garbage is just the beginning of us humans – society – getting used to this new, revolutionary medium. She notes that from the development of movable type – and the large, overflowing development of books in response – had a lot of garbage as well. Over all, Shirky implies that humans have a great potential – and as a society, experiment much to find the “way” of using a medium to its advantage – similar to how books brought about writing classes, storytelling classes and even persuasive writing classes.

Now, while I do support that using the internet may change its users’ habits, I trust Cascio’s insight, in which he declares that humans “learn to adapt their thinking and expectations to these digital systems, even as the system designs become more complex and powerful to meet more of their needs” (Cascio). While Nick Carr argues that it decreases our attention span, I maintain that, as humans grow more and more accustomed to the technology in its relation to their lives – and also achieves mastery over it – humans will be able to subconsciously switch from deep reading a book needed for school to picking interesting articles to read on the internet in their free time. Shirky’s concepts of experimentation and human society patching its own problems through education is also another route which may decrease the negative effects of the internet, and empower the usage of the internet medium to a new level.

As Nick Carr emphasizes that the usage of the internet forms mental circuitry of a different kind against those “of books and other printed works,” (Carr) I feel that the internet is simply allowing humans to grow further and change their mindsets. The very thought that usage of the internet creates its own mental circuitry in humans reveals that Cascio’s claim of human adaptation to technology isn’t far off. I feel that as humans get used to the internet and daily life, the mental circuits created by all the new gadgets and gears in human life would improve and form in a way that humans would be able to focus their mind when they are required to. The internet’s own unique mental circuitry would be guided, and refined by society itself, as Shirky implies. After all, humans have done it with books, why not with the internet?

Although Nick Carr supports his argument with the naysayers of the past, such as Socrates and Plato, being true in their predictions about writing and others about books, this argument is refuted by Shirky’s own explanation. Shirky, although they both agree that such revolutions have had their negative impacts, Shirky takes it a little further and explains that society itself remedied the problems through education, leaving society with a still-educated, and even smarter sense of self due to the new mastery of the medium through education.

While Nick Carr complains about the possible shortcomings of the internet and its effect on its users, possibly revealed on the mediocre quality items around the internet, Cascio emphasizes that the tools to manage the overflowing information introduced by the internet is still in its infancy – that is, he advocates the improvement of humankind’s “fluid intelligence” which is able to manage much information and its flow. This “fluid intelligence” may very well be a part of the mental circuitry that Nick Carr mentions, and its mastery would be prove the true form of the mental circuitry the internet itself embeds in its users. Also, as Shirky implies in his talk about the future of the internet, maybe even a class itself would appear – like learning how to write – to master fluid intelligence and grant a stronger adaptation to the new medium, the internet. Thus, according to both Shirky and Cascio, human society has the ability to respond over time to its shortcomings and fix them.

The new era the internet will usher in takes time to fully blossom. And although there are shortcomings and problems to the human mind the internet may pose, I sense that humans, like how Cascio states are “self-developing,” will surely triumph and successfully adapt to the internet, as well as future developments in technology by humankind. Thus the decreasing ability of attention will soon fade away, remedied by human adaptation and intelligence. Human potential shouldn’t be underestimated. As events similar to the internet have happened in the past and were fixed, the recent problems exposed by the internet will also be fixed by the society it plagues.