What especially attracts my attention, though, is that the more complex types of external software-including the Internet-tend to involve communication and interaction, and thus they tend to be specifically social: they tend to involve the thoughts, feelings, and actions of many individuals, pooled in some way to make them accessible to individuals, including me. The Internet thus facilitates an age-old tendency of the human mind to benefit from our tendency as a species to be homo dictyous (network man), an innate tendency we all have to connect with others and to be influenced by them.
In this regard, the Internet is both mind-expanding and atavistic. The Internet is no different than previous (equally monumental) brain-enhancing technologies such as books or telephony, and I doubt whether books and telephony have changed the way I think, in the sense of actually changing the way my brain works (which is the particular way I am taking the question before us). In fact, I would say that it is much more correct to say that our thinking gave rise to the Internet than that the Internet gave rise to our thinking. It has taken centuries for humans to accumulate mathematical knowledge and I learned geometry and calculus in high school in a way that probably would have astonished mathematicians just a few centuries ago.Īnother apt analogy is perhaps mathematics. But, like other students, I did this with the same brain we've all had for millennia. The math surely changed how I think about the world.
But did it change the way I think? Did it change my brain? The answer is mostly no. To be clear, the Internet is assuredly changing quite a few things related to cognition and social interaction. One widely appreciated and important example of both is the way the Internet facilitates hive-mind phenomena, like Wikipedia, that integrate the altruistic impulses and the knowledge of thousands of far-flung individuals.
To the extent that I participate in such things (and I do), my thinking and I are both affected by the Internet.īut most thinking serves social ends. #POCKET MIRROR OST CHEMICAL PRESENCE SOFTWARE#Ī strong indicator of this fact is that the intellectual content of most conversation is trivial, and it certainly is not focused on complex ideas about philosophy or mathematics.
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