Net Wisdom?

Is the Internet making us dumber?

David Brooks implied as much a few weeks ago in his New York Times column “The Outsourced Brain,” when he embraced the fact that new technologies and the Internet were doing all our intellectual heavy lifting nowadays:

My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.

Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.

I filed that away in my mental attic at the time, tucking it away between Jeanne Zelasko’s clichés during the World Series and oddball jack-o-lantern designs.

But then it resurfaced when I read an interview with law professor Cass Sunstein where he basically agreed with the essence of Brooks’ remarks, but was nowhere near as sanguine about it. As the Salon dot com interviewer opened:

Freedom of choice is not always good for democracy. This observation is at the heart of University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein's book "Republic.com 2.0" (an update of "Republic.com" in 2001), which argues that our country's political discourse is fracturing in the information age. Sure, the Internet has been a boon to democracy in all sorts of ways, Sunstein acknowledges -- but if new technology gives us unprecedented access to information, it also gives us more ways to avoid information we don't like. Conservatives are increasingly seeking only conservative views, liberals are seeking only liberal views, and never the twain shall meet.

While this isn’t necessarily the same as saying the Internet and technology is making us dumber, the common thread in both insights is that we’re not as sharp as we used to be. Where once we would have the mental pliability to reason out through an opposing view – or, in Brooks’ case, a different travel route – we’re losing that now.

And yes, I’ll grant you that ‘sharp’ is a pretty nebulous term. But I think that by granting over a certain amount of our mental energy to an electronic box, we’re losing some critical thinking ability. The moment “google” morphed from a noun to a verb, it was clear we weren’t using the Internet as a reference tool (remember the encyclopedias at the library?) as much as a crutch.

American democracy was born in barroom arguments in Philadelphia and Boston, with people challenging each other's views, priorities and political philosophies. Can you imagine Thomas Paine interrupting a debate over a pint to see if the tavern had wi-fi?

I’m probably going to get my Blog Guy Pass revoked for pointing all of this out, but it’s important to remember to make the effort to read or watch or listen to something we disagree with every once in awhile to keep those mental muscles toned. Flabby bodies are one thing, but flabby minds are even worse.