Weapon of mass distraction ?

By Ranjan Yumnam *

Does the internet make you dumber ? That's the heading of an article published in the Wall Street Journal written by Nicholas Carr, who believes that internet and its myriad offerings like Facebook and Google are making us stupid and superficial. To the millions of addicted fans of these websites, this is a heresy and anyone who propagates it deserves to be burned at the stake.

Truth be told, I am on neither side of the fence, but I can appreciate the theory of Carr — that internet has diminished our analytical abilities and reduced us to mere processors of signals to such extent that our cognitive system is sort of mutating into something similar to that of a stupid creature having a pea-sized brain.

Our attention span is getting shorter. We no more read, we skim. We are beginning to hate the long stories (I used to read the long journalism of Hindu; now I ski over the slippery Yahoo News!) and skip them under the blinking distraction of pop-ups and multimedia links. War and Peace or the trivia of Facebook? No prize for guessing that. The habit of deep reading is dying. We are the 21st century digital peeping toms; we don't engage, we just peep—Hyperlink, Click, Scroll, Hyperlink, Click, Scroll.

Internet promised us the utopia of a flat world where everyone would have equal access to information and be empowered to create, consume and share content. Internet freed us from the Big Media that controlled our thought menu in the form of news, opinion pieces, films, documentaries, music, so on and so forth.

Slowly but surely, the World Wide Web has dethroned the sweeping powers of the traditional media to set the agendas for us — what to read, what to watch and what to listen to. It is both a boon and also a curse. The medium of internet has spawned a generation of free loaders. Music is supposed to be free, films are a downloadable digital debri, works of art and great literary sweat should be just a click away. It is a crazy world out there, Mr Anderson.

While internet has bridged the gaps that existed between nations and peoples and made communication and collaboration easier for likeminded organisations and individuals to accomplish noble objectives such as mobilising awareness and fund for worthy social, economic and political causes, it also has darker sides to it. Internet has shrunken the world, honey, but it also has shrunken our worldview.

One illuminating example would be facebook, the popular social networking website. Facebook has enormous potential for business networking and collaboration, no doubt about it. I fear that it has also confined us to a cocoon and made us more rigid and dogmatic. While we commend each other's wallpost, drop flattering comments on status updates and admire works and photographs of the persons in our friends' list, the most ardent of us are increasingly becoming resentful of dissenting views.

We are being defined by our friends' list. The exposure that newspaper gave us to different viewpoints is giving way to the fundamentalism of internet groups. Facebook is not enriching us, it is turning us into bigots and connecting us to other bigots by creating an illusion that the whole world thinks like we do, only more resolutely—dissenters be damned.

Another philosophical question is : Are the friends in the Facebook for real? It lulls us into thinking that we are surrounded by multitudes of friends, but in fact, they are as good as mere digital avatars in a Video-game. Facebook reconnects us with our old and lost pals, the sweetheart of our schooldays, our relatives, employers and co-workers, but it does a bad job of forging new real and meaningful friendship.

While Facebook is enrolling us into 'incestuous' community (of same likes and dislikes, political views, etc), Google is turning us into the consumers of the same content—in turn making us conformist. The search algorithm of Google is designed in such a way that the most popular content in terms of most visited links get ranked higher in the search engine's results.

This is scary. It means that internet users all over the world are in fact reading the same stuff that Google plays up in its search results. Google has become an agency that propagates the dominant ideas of the times, not necessarily the whole truth or the alternative viewpoints.

I don't know whether Google is making me dumb, but it has definitely made me lazier. I hardly rely on my memory to recall important and even basic information that should have been at my finger tips before the advent of internet. Now I don't try to remember, say, the Capitals of the countries of the world or their currencies; I simply log into internet and bingo there it is.

I have also stopped buying GK books on the logic that as long as I carry around a data card, what the hell. You might say, it is a good thing because it has freed us and given us more time to ponder on more profound issues that need our attention.

I fear the worst : our brain is getting rusted and imbecile. It is getting less exercise. We are ignoring the little jogs that can prepare us for marathon. When internet services happen to be hit by a terrorist attack or anything less dramatic than that, most of us would be helpless and as foolish as a new born baby.

Thanks to internet, we are writing more frequently. But we are writing telegraphic rubbish, and not the elegant prose that we are supposed to produce by virtue of constantly chatting, commenting, status updating and smsing. Instead of enriching our writing skills, internet has spawned a culture of permissive writing devoid of all literary quality and subtlety. It has killed grammar and twisted spellings. It is spreading illiteracy.

Multitasking that is associated with our internet experience is again diluting the concentration that is required to produce works of extraordinary creativity and innovations. It is in fact diminishing our innate talents and abilities by distracting us from doing anything with depth and focus. Productivity and efficiency have been sacrificed at the altar of rituals like checking emails 24/7 and the induced need to be always on ON mode.

At least one study found out that students given laptops and access to internet in the classroom are not as attentive and receptive to lectures in the class as students having no laptops, even if they were accessing online content related to the subject of the lecture. Blame the multitasking/concentration factor. Seriously we need to revisit the e-learning concept.

At the cultural and social front, more divorces are being blamed on Facebook. The tell tale signs of cheating used to be the lipstick stain on the collar, the sms, emails, restaurant bills, etc, now it is Facebook. Relationships are being enacted through wall posts and comments, propositions come through Friend request and not in a secret party. The temptations are far and many and the opportunities galore, click by click.

But please do not jump to the conclusion that I am a Neanderthal who disdains new technology. In fact, I am as crazy about new gadgets and internet as the teenage pimpled face next door. Deprive me of car, telephone or friends, but not internet. I am that kind of internet dependant person.

The point is : Internet, with all its enabling powers, should not control us and make us facetious, time wasting creatures of habit and less productive, which got me thinking whether I should create a Facebook page on this theme? OMG.

(Views expressed are personal)

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was webcasted on August 12, 2010.