MATTHEW  ISOM

The Quiet Revolution--Who We Were, Who We Are Becoming

 

 

As we think of power in the 21st century, we want to get away from the idea that power’s always zero sum game — my gain is your loss and vice versa. Power can also be positive sum, where your gain can be my gain.

                                                                                                                                                  — Joseph Nye

 

 

 

 

       Many times in the history of mankind dramatic changes in the way people interact have changed society and the way that progress is made. Often this change is prompted by a new technology, and when this happens, people are invariably quick to call it “bad” or “good.” Nothing is ever that simple, of course. As Nicholas Carr states, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan, “an honest appraisal of any new technology, or of progress in general, requires a sensitivity to what’s lost as well as what’s gained” (Carr, 2010, p. 212). Much has been gained and some things lost with the advent of the Internet, which became ubiquitous in the mid to late 1990’s. It became a source of nearly infinite knowledge and, more importantly, a source of knowledge that is equally available to all, where “a 13-year-old has the same access to the information and distribution network on the World Wide Web that the multi-national billion-dollar corporation has” (Pletka, 2007, p. 28). No wonder Thomas Friedman says that the playing field has been leveled and that “the world is flat” (Friedman, 2005).

       In light of Carr and McLuhan’s insight into the risks as well as benefits of new technologies, it is not surprising that experts are divided concerning the power of the Internet. What exactly do society and the individual lose when this technology becomes    part of our lives? Are the benefits great enough to outweigh the losses? Some, like Mark Bauerlein, feel that this technology fragments and distracts people, in particular the Net Generation because it has never known pre-Internet life. Bauerlein feels that the impact is profound, actually making them “the dumbest generation” and potentially “jeapordiz[ing] our future” (Bauerlein,The Dumbest Generation, 2008, NP). Similarly, In his book Nicholas Carr argues that society is losing its ability to do deep reading and that the higher-level thinking that comes from this focused reading is being lost (Carr, The Shallows, 2010). . Neil Postman’s argument against information technology, although directed toward television, is similar as he claims that people are losing their ability to follow complex arguments, and even worse, are becoming less and less interested in discussing deep issues. For him the tragedy is not just that people lose the ability to do deep thinking but that that simply stop doing it because they’re more attracted to the excitement of multi-media.

       Others fall on the other side of McCluhan’s dichotomy and feel that much more is gained from the Internet than is lost.  Steven Johnson counters Bauerlein and Carr’s argument that people are becoming less intelligent, and he even goes so far as to make the counterintuitive argument that the fragmented nature of multi-media--the Internet, TV, and even video games--is the very thing that is making our society smarter (Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You, 2005). Sir Kenneth Robinson’s message is that the public educational system has been gravely outdated for decades and that technology should be used to help students learn the way that they are already learning on the Internet, which is working creatively and collaboratively. Perhaps the best argument  concerning the impact of the Internet comes from Clay Shirky. He contends that human beings long to connect with one another in order to share their ideas and create collaborative projects and that the Internet has made this possible to a revolutionary degree. One thing that all of the aforementioned experts agree upon is that the coming of the Internet has dramatically changed life on this planet. Are we in crisis, or are we facing an opportunity heretofore not known to man? One thing we do know is that life has changed for all two billion people who are on the Internet. The Internet has not only changed the way we do things, but it has actually changed who we are as human beings.

       If, as Nicholas Carr and Mark Bauerlein claim, the Internet is making the rising generation of children less intelligent, can it possibly be a positive influence in our society? This question deserves careful consideration. In his pivotal work The Shallows--What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr argues that the act of reading has dramatically changed with the coming of the Internet. He says “skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading “and that “in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization [has changed and that] we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest” (Carr, 2010, p. 138). When people engage in this type of reading (which involves multi-tasking as hyperlinks are followed), this “hampers our ability to think deeply.” Additionally, “The more you multi-task, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” And the problem with this is that one becomes “more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought” (Carr, p. 140).

       This is an important point. If, as Thomas Friedman argues in his seminal work The World is Flat (2005), the only way to maintain supremacy in this ever-changing marketplace is to generate creative ideas, the loss of traditional reading could be disastrous, especially for the United States who is currently maintaining a competitive advantage primarily through innovative, creative ideas such as the Windows operating system and the iPhone. A further implication is that our educational system will suffer, at least in areas of innovative thinking. Thus, as the U.S. tries to maintain competitive economic advantage, ironically the very thing that could enable this advantage could be disappearing because of the technology we so value.

       Carr points out that such a  change in thinking is not something that can be easily corrected because these changes become ingrained in the way the brain functions. He cites research on brain plasticity which shows that the brain “undergoe[s] rapid and extensive restructuring at the cellular level” (Carr, p. 25). In an intriguing experiment with monkeys who were taught to use rakes and pliers, Carr says that “the rakes and pliers actually came to be incorporated into the brain maps of the animals’ hands. The tools, so far as the animals’ brains were concerned, had become part of their bodies . . . as if the pliers were now the hand fingers” (Carr, p. 32). This same phenomenon can be seen in humans playing the violin, wherein the bow becomes an extension of the hand, and in the study playing the violin, like a primate using a rake, resulted in substantial physical changes in the brain” (Carr, p. 32).

       Such physiological brain change is even more pronounced in Carr’s example of a study of London cab drivers. “When they compared the [brain] scans with those of a control group, they found that the taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampus . . . was much larger than normal. Moreover, the longer a cab driver had been on the job, the larger his posterior hippocampus tended to be . . . and [conversely] the anterior hippocampus was smaller than average, apparently a result of the need to accommodate the enlargement of the posterior area” and that this “might have reduced the cabbies’ aptitude for certain other memorization tasks” (Carr, p. 33). Applying McCluhan’s idea here, what is lost is the cabbies’ memorization aptitude, and what is gained is a stronger spatial processing ability “required to navigate London’s intricate road system” (Carr, p. 33).

       Carr’s point is that the Internet requires people to perform new tasks and to read in new ways that are rewiring the brain and literally changing the way that people think. The linear thinking required for deep reading and the accompanying concentrated, lengthy thought requisite for deep (as opposed to shallow) thought is lost. And what is gained? Mere access to greater amounts of information means nothing if people are losing the ability to think, Carr implies. Facts without knowledge lead nowhere.

       Steven Johnson disagrees with the idea that the type of reading people do today decreases their ability to think. In fact, he argues the opposite, saying that such reading “has had a salutary effect on our minds” (Johnson, 2005). Of the Internet’s diverse stimuli, he says that “exploring nonlinear document structures” leads to increased interactivity of the brain, and that this makes us smarter (Johnson, 2005, p. 117). He also feels that video games and even TV watching affect the brain the same way that navigating the labyrinth of interconnected, hyperlinked sites on the Internet does. When he argues that video games actually increase intelligence, he says that “the thing you almost never hear in the mainstream coverage is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly, hard” (Johnson, p. 25). He adds that the player must “pick up the game’s inner logic” and that sometimes that takes weeks (Johnson, p. 31). As anyone over the age of 35 can attest, learning to perform simple tasks on the Internet, such as signing up for a Twitter account or downloading podcasts, navigating the complexities of the Internet can be “maddeningly hard” as well. Using the Internet and its accompanying Web 2.0 tools requires a type of brain rewiring and which happens for children much more easily than it does for adults. The question we must answer is whether or not such rewiring is more advantageous than it is damaging. Johnson says that it is; Carr says it isn’t.

       Following his idea that the challenges of modern multi-media are increasing the intelligence of modern man, Johnson cites the Flynn effect, the fact that IQ scores (as they are typically measured), have been increasing during the years of multi-media. In addition to the fact that scores are increasing, Johnson posits that “IQ may be due largely to environmental factors” (Johnson, p. 141). He implies that the new environment of multi-media is contributing to greater intelligence.  But is this increase in problem solving ability (such as the ability to program a computer) very important? In particular, if increased IQ comes at the cost of a diminishing ability to think deeply about things that improve the quality of life, is the Internet’s influence worth it in the final analysis? Mark Bauerlein emphatically disagrees.

       Bauerlein’s argument begins with the idea that teenagers today have not learned essential information, information that is requisite for being an informed and functioning citizen. He cites a PEW research study that states that only 15 percent of 18-24 year-olds know that Vladamir Putin is the president of Russia, a statistic that isn’t surprising when coupled with Bauerlein’s observation that barely half of people in that age group feel that “paying attention to government and politics is important to good citizenship” (Bauerlein, 2009, p. 19). Perhaps more alarming is a statistic Baeuerlein cites from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA concerning the change in America’s youth during the last 40 years.  We read: “In 1966, the survey tabulated 60 percent of first-year students who considered it “very important” to keep up with political affairs. In 2005, that figure plummeted to 36 percent, notwithstanding  9/11” (Bauerlein, 2009, p. 21). which could explain why Perhaps the fact that only “63 percent of [them could] identify Iraq on a map, and 30 percent of them selected U.S./Mexico as the most fortified border in the world” (Bauerlein, 2009, p. 26) can be explained by the idea that they are a coddled, self-absorbed generation (Pletka 2007, p. 19). One does wonder, however how members of the country could be informed members of the electorate if they do not know the hotspots of conflict in the world and the historical significance of those settings. After adding the Declaration of Independence to his list of woefully lacking knowledge found in the Net Generation, Bauerlein states:

       “Think of how many things you must do in order not to know the year 1776 or the British prime minister or the Fifth Amendment. At the start, you must forget the lessons of school--history class, social studies, government, geography, English, philosophy, and art history. You must care nothing about current events, elections, foreign policy, and war. No newspapers, no political magazines, no NPR or Rush Limbaugh, no CNN, Fox News . . . and your friends must act the same way, never letting a historical fact or current affair slip into a cell phone exchange” (Bauerlein, 2009, p. 13). It does give one pause. It’s almost as if the Net Generation tries to avoid this type of information. Maybe they do, even if subconsciously.

       Perhaps some of the “ignorance” could be influenced by the way the Internet has changed the Net Generation’s perspective on knowledge and the importance of having facts memorized.  If virtually all facts are available through a quick Google search, why take the time to memorize them or pay attention in history class, they might say. For example, here’s how quickly people can now access the type of information Bauerlein is talking about. A Google search of  “What is the most fortified border in the world” yields over 4.2 million results in 0.32 seconds, and while walking down the street one can ask a Smartphone the same question and get the same instantaneous results. Members of the Net Generation know that they can find answers immediately, and perhaps they don’t concern themselves with learning these things because they would rather focus  their time and efforts elsewhere. Just where are they focusing that time, though?

Are members of the Net Generation living in a bubble, “amusing themselves to death,” to paraphrase Neil Postman (Postman, 1985) as they text, play video games, and hang out on FaceBook? Postman points out that “[y]ou cannot do political philosophy on televion. Its form works against the content” (Postman, 1985, p. 7). Similarly, the medium of the Internet could be its message, to paraphrase McCluhan’s most famous statement, and that message might be that knowing that the DMZ is the most fortified border in the world is not important.

       Clay Shirky says that the current generation is actually turning away from the television, although he does not address the idea that deeper thoughts are ensuing. What he does say, however--and this is vitally important--is that people are quitting their time in front of the TV and using that time to connect with people and collectively make a difference in the world. Shirky deals with this idea extensively in his book Here Comes Everybody--Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adops new behaviors. The lead off story is of a woman named Ivanna who lost her phone in a New York City cab. The phone was subsequently stolen, and the thief had the audacity to refuse to return the phone (she was tracked because the pictures and emails she sent on the phone had been transferred to her new phone). Ivanna’s friend, Evan, posted the story on Digg and, in Shirky’s words, “The story clearly struck a nerve. Evan was getting ten e-mails a minute from poeple . . . volunteering to help” (Shirky, 2008, p. 3). Eventually millions (literally) of readers were following the story. The New York Times and CNN picked up the story, and even though the police had initially refused to help on the grounds that the phone was lost and not stolen, public outcry applied enough pressure that the NYPD reversed its decision and arrested the thief.  Because of the connecting power of the Internet people are able to join causes, even the somewhat trivial example of the search for a missing cell phone, and the huge number of people working together, like millions of ants are able to bring about social change as people band together to fight a cause.

       Other much more significant causes are being fought and won, causes which would have been futile without the connecting power of the Internet. An 18-year-old student named Natalie Warne was able to use the Internet to bring together enough people to bring to the attention of the American public the atrocities of Joseph Kony’s genocide and child slavery battle. Finally, after Warne appeared on the Oprah Winfrey, President Obama signed into law the “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act to stop Kony. To a significant extent, the world’s commitment to end Kony’s atrocities can be traced to the acts of one girl and her massive fight that was made possible through the Internet’s ability to connect people. (http://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_warne_being_young_and_making_an_impact.html)

        What motivates people like Natalie Warne to sacrifice huge amounts of time and effort for little to no monetary gain? Shirky feels that a great part of the answer lies in people’s desire to make their mark felt in today’s participatory culture. “To participate is to act as if your presence matters” (Shirky, 2010, p. 21). And in Johnson’s words, “We are no longer passively consuming media--the Internet is not just something you manipulate, but something you project your identity onto, a place to work through the story of your life as it unfolds” (Johnson, 2005, p. 119). As Mr. Keating says to his students in the film Dead Poets’ Society, people live lives of quiet desperation (Thoreau) and cry out, longing to make a difference in this world. Then, quoting Walt Whitman, “O me! O life!. . . of the questions of these recurring . . . what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer: That you are here--that life exists, and identity, that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse." Mr. Keating's final question to his students is,  "What will your verse be?"

       The Internet has made it possible for millions of people to come together to make a difference in the world. Often those efforts are made intentionally, at great personal cost. Other times that diffeence is made as people come together in a more casual way as the masses get together on Facebook to search for a lost cell phone and end out fighting city hall. At other times more initiative is required, as in the Ushahidi cause in Kenya wherein everyday citizens posted photos and tweets of violence and human rights violations to successfully fight a corrupt government (Ushahidi, which is Swahili for “witness,” has now expanded to fight causes worldwide). At other times people band together with virtually no effort, sometimes unknowingly. Such is the case with the CAPTCHA and Duolingo programs created by Luis von Ahn. 

       In his TED Talk "Massive-Scale Online Collaboration," von Ahn shows that virtually all people have unknowingly  taken part in a very significant cause. He tells of the creation of CATCHA, which is the wavy, distorted word one has to type when signing up for an online account. Von Ahn and his colleagues were disturbed when they realized that 200 million people were wasting 10 seconds of their day rather than doing something productive. Von Ahn does the math for us and points out that this means that humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours every day  (von Ahn, 2011 Recorded at TEDxCMU, April 2011, in Pittsburgh, PA. Duration: 16:40). He then points out that there is, because during those ten seconds “the brain is doing something that computers can’t do.” The crux of the project is that computers using OCR (optical character recognition) are unable to read 30 percent of the words in books published more than 50 years ago. What CAPTCHA does is allow people to read the words that the computer cannot decipher and collectively two billion people are working to translate all the works of literature in the history of mankind. “So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book, and  every time you add a FaceBook friend or poke somebody, you help to digitize a book.”  To make his final point he adds, “ the number of words that we're digitizing per day is . . . about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year” (von Ahn, 2011).

         For the first five to ten years after the inception of the Internet, it’s impact was largely seen in terms of access to information for the individual and as a democratizing power of equal access to the sea of knowledge, an access that gives even “disadvantaged” youth in, say Bangladesh, the same information that has previously only been available to experts with privileged access to the great libraries of the world. In short, the internet has been seen as powerful because of the empowering information that it brings to individuals. During the last five years or so, however, an increased focus has been placed on the power of the internet to connect people. Facebook was founded in 2004, and although only 1 million people had signed on by the end of that year, subscriptions skyrocketed in 2009 and reached 350 million by year’s end.  In September of 2012 Mark Zuckerberg reported that Facebook had reached 1 billion users, a number of interconnected people that would have been absolutely inconceivable prior to 1990. The power of this interconnectedness can be seen in the title of Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody (2008). The second half of the title reads: “Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors.” The new behavior is making connections. More specifically connections that enable people to collaborate.     

       Clay Shirky begins his book Cognitive Surplus with an example of a changing world in crisis. The world in question was not that of the 21st Century but, rather, that of 18th Century London. And the crisis was the Gin Craze. People were getting drunk, families were falling apart, and the workforce was weakened as addicts turned to the bottle rather than contributing to society (Shirky, 2010, p. 2). People today Society has dramatically changed. Similar things have been said about the state of our society as the Digital Age makes its influence felt.  Women lament the loss of husbands as they retreat into virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft; educators desperately try to get distracted students to focus so that they can pass standardized tests; parents despair that their children have fallen into a frenzy of media addiction that threatens their ability to become successful members of society. Our world is going through a technological revolution, and that revolution is turning over society. As McCluhan would undoubtedly say, much has been lost by the adoption of the Internet and the ways that it influences the brain, fragments reading, and addicts people to dazzling online activity.

       Just whether or not  revolution is a bad thing or a good thing is hard to say.  As with all things, there is always a bit of both.  Those who are quick to call technology “bad,” would benefit from hearing Shirky’s conclusions regarding the Gin Craze.   He points out that the problem was not drinking.  It might seem difficult to see a parallel between the Gin Craze and our predicament at the start of the new millennium.  But there is a vital similarity, and it is two-pronged.   The primary similarity is that  the nature of communities has changed, but more importantly, Shirky points out that in London the problem wasn’t the drinking.  He says, “Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when in fact it was a reaction to the real problem--dramatic social change and the inability of older civic models to adapt.”  As he continues, we begin to see the parallel to our current predicament. “What helped the Gin Craze subside was the restructuring of society around the new urban realities created by London’s incredible social density, a restructuring that turned London into what we’d recognize as a modern city, one of the first” (Shirky, 2010).  He ends up by concluding that many of the best aspects of our contemporary society were actually benefits achieved by the so-called problem of the population density of cities. He points to mutual aid societies, restaurants, and political parties as three of the organizations that help define what we now see as society.  

        Today we have a similar issue to that of 18th Century London.  The world is now connected through the Internet and the population of our communities has grown astronomically. Today people have “moved” into new neighborhoods and communities, and problems have arisen, problems such as those mentioned by Bauerlein, Carr, and countless parents, spouses and teachers.  Shirky contends, however, that because society is now connected and that people are empowered by Web 2.0 tools, we have a huge opportunity for people to become collaborators and for the individual to become a player on the world stage.  The question for all of us now is, “What will be your verse? What contribution will you make now that you--every one of you, not just the elite--are interconnected with the rest of humanity?

 

References

 

Bauerlein, M. (2009).  The dumbest generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future. New York, NY: Penguin.

           

Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York, NY: Norton & Company.

 

Friedman, T (2005). The world is flat. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, NY

 

Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you: How today’s popular culture is

actually making us smarter. New York, NY: Penguin

 

Palfrey, J. & Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital--Understanding the first generation of

digital natives. New York, NY: Basic Books

 

Pletka, B (2007) Educating the net generation. Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press

 

Postman, N (1985). Amusing ourselves to death—Public discourse in the age of show  business. New York, NY: Penguin

 

Shirkey, C. (2008). Here comes everybody. New York, NY: Penguin

 

Shirkey, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus--How technology makes consumers into

collaborators. New York, NY: Penguin

                                                                       

von Ahn, L. (2011). TED Talk

 

Warne, N. (2009). TED Talk