The Internet is Making Us Dumber.

Pro points (agree)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284981644790098.html

The Internet is killing our 'attention spans'. We are no longer able to concentrate like
before. Nick Carr's book, 'The Shallows', uses scientific evidence to argue that the
Internet is making us less attentive to our environments. The richness of our thoughts,
our memories and even our personalities hinges on our ability to focus the mind and
sustain concentration. Only when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information
are we able to associate it "meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already
well established in memory," writes the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric
Kandel.

People who read text studded with links, the studies show, understand less than those
who read traditional linear text ( Carr, 2010) If we are distracted and interrupted, as we
tend to be online, our brains cannot create strong and expansive neural connections that
give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units,
moving (quickly shepherding) disjointed bits of information into and then out of
short-term memory.

People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take
in information in a relaxed and focused manner. Patricia Greenfield, a leading
developmental psychologist, said, studies show that certain computer tasks, like
playing video games, can improve "visual literacy skills," increasing the speed at which
people can shift their focus among icons and other images on screens. BUT, other
studies, however, show that such rapid shifts in focus, even if performed smoothly ,
result in less rigorous and "more automatic" thinking.

A Cornell University showed that when half a class of students was allowed to use
Internet-connected laptops during a lecture, and the other kept their computers shut,
the users who browsed the Web performed much worse on a subsequent test of how well
they understood the lecture's content. While it's hardly surprising that Web surfing
would distract students, it should be a note of caution to schools that are wiring their
classrooms in hopes of improving learning.
Screen-based media strengthens visual-spatial intelligence, and improve the ability to
do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of simultaneous signals, like air traffic control
BUT it has been accompanied by "new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes,"
including "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving,
critical thinking, and imagination." We're becoming, in a word, shallower.

People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand
less than those who are able to concentrate (even when not online). The bad effects don't
aways go away when we turn off our computers and cellphones. The cellular structure of
the human brain, adapts to the tools we use, i.e. for finding, storing and sharing
information. By changing our habits of mind, each new technology strengthens certain
neural pathways and weakens others. The cellular changes shape the way we think
even when not using technology.
Humans are being rewired: N euroscientist Michael Merzenich believes our brains are
being "massively remodeled" by our use of the Web and related media. In the 1970s and
1980s, Mr. Merzenich, now a professor emeritus at the University of California in San
Francisco, conducted a famous series of experiments on primate brains that revealed
how extensively and quickly neural circuits change in response to experience. Recently
he said that he was worried about the cognitive consequences of the constant
distractions and interruptions the Internet bombards us with. The long-term effect on
the quality of our intellectual lives, he said, could be "deadly."

Books are better: By surfing and searching we are losing out ability to engage in quieter,
attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection.
The Web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental
change. Compared with the book, the Internet scatters our attention, but the book
focuses attention. Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness. Reading
helps us develop a rare kind of mental discipline. Though fast-paced, reflexive shifts in
focus were once crucial to our survival, for thinking they are not helpful. R
Negative Points (disagree)

Clay Shirky's latest book is "Cognitive Surplus:

Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html

1. It all depends on how we use the Internet: it can give promote intelligence and
sharing.

2. Internet has allowed for increases in freedom – to

publish and to speak. All increases in freedom from
paperback books to YouTube, alarms people who liked
the old system, and are sure that the new media
will make young people stupid. This fear dates back
to at least the invention of movable type. When
Gutenberg's press spread through Europe, the Bible
was translated into local languages. Dumbed
down versions of the Christian bible led to fears that standards of thinking would
fall. But by the 16th-century, new norms of ' novels, newspapers, scientific
journals...' were a way of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range
and output of society.

3. An improvement on television: digital media

links over a billion people into the same
network. This linking together helps us
acces our cognitive surplus. Before we spent
our free time watching TV, but now we have
more time and can do something better than
watching television. This is a movement from
' consumption' to 'participation'.
4. Wikipedia has spread knowledge to a wider audience: it took
the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a
global scale. It became the most important English reference
work in less than 10 years. It took something like 100 million
hours of human thought to create. It took a fractional shift in the direction of
participation to create remarkable new educational resources. (Plus 'Open Source'
Software).

5.
There are a lot of bad resources on
the Internet; resources that are not
educational, but though we have
The World's Funniest Home Videos
running 24/7 on YouTube, in the
history of print, we got erotic novels
100 years before we got scientific

journals. People used to think that books were a distraction from religious thinking.
Also, Edgar Allan Poe, writing during another surge in publishing, said , "The
enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest
evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of
correct information."

5. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.