The Challenge to Preserve the Pursuit of Knowledge in an Internet Driven World

“Life is about the Journey, not the Destination.”
- Anonymous
Intelligence is cited as the ability to learn and to apply what is learned. It is not the accumulation of data. Learning occurs at multiple levels: physical, emotional, factual and intellectual. Each of these areas are driven by different factors and changes as we mature. Intelligence is impacted by each of our learning processes. First as a child we learn through sensual experiences, and as our brains mature we are able to move into abstract thinking we learn through challenges in each level of our experience. We learn through social relationships, through every grade at school and the problems we are required to solve, poems we are required to memorize, essays we are required to research, and the books we are required to read. All of these processes call for the active involvement of us as participants engaging in our own creative thought modeled by the skills and knowledge that we have developed.
Google distracts us from this kind of creative thinking. Google dazzles and entertains us with its ability to provide people globally with an infinite supply of facts, resources, and facilitates through which we can gather further information. It simplifies our access to data. However, the foundation of Google’s financial model is grounded in advertising and for that reason it pesters us with constant interruptions. Viewers are often overwhelmed by the excessive amount of information jumping up before them, which consequently makes it extremely difficult for the reader focus on any single article at hand. As Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of Reading Brain so astutely articulated it, “when we read online we tend to become mere decoders of information”.
The most disastrous upshot of modern society’s obsessive use of the internet is the crippling effect it is having on the sustainability of our attention span. By influencing the manner in which humans minds are accustomed to receiving and processing information from the internet has significantly contributed to our current society’s unhealthy dependence and infatuation with attention deficit disorder prescription drugs such as Adderall, and Ritalin. Dependency on such drugs will lead to: high blood pressure, sleep disorders, seizures, weight loss, hallucinations, severe dehydration, muscle pains, vomiting, mood changes and nervousness, much of which I have personally experienced as side effects of my own prescribed use of Adderall.
Due to this generation’s inability to focus for an extended period of time they are constantly looking for shortcuts. One such example can be seen in a study performed by Dr. Rafael Capurro. His research has successfully established a solid correlation between the growing number of university students that have begun plagiarizing other people’s materials instead of taking the time to produce their own original works and the rising number of college students that are now accessing the web. This dwindling of ethics and the decline of ambition demonstrated by these younger generations will eventually prove to be a serious problem upon their entering the work place. The fact of the matter is that in reality the only way to get ahead is through hard work and determination. These are the qualities that deliver results and which contribute to giving a person substance. Google may be able to overload a student with enough random facts to pass a pop quiz, but it cannot instill within them the common sense they will need to excel and succeed later in life. I fear this will prove to be a rude awakening for these individuals which our society has weakened by feeding them with a silver spoon of technological connivances.
Nicholas Carr summarized Google’s current philosophy in his article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid" as being, “The more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers”. This excerpt exemplifies the way in which Google is neglecting the purpose and value of providing individuals with these vast sources of information in the first place. Knowledge is not about simply accessing information it is about comprehending, questioning it, and absorbing it. The distilled wisdom of distinguished literary works produced by brilliant philosophers, historians, politicians, mathematicians, and astronomers are not meant to be skimmed over and rushed through. They are meant to educate us, and provoke our own curiosity. Each page functions as a piece of the puzzle and as such was included with intent and is therefore important to one’s understanding of the overall work.
The original founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page ambitiously described future technological achievements they dream are possible of the human race; a world in which people could be plugged into or dare I say be replaced by computers. In 2004, Brin stated that, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” This notion is both disturbing and unnatural. I must also beg the question. To what benefit would it be to have access to an endless supply of information if it was just programmed into you? You will have been deprived of the fundamental experience of learning which is the very purpose and enrichment of one’s existence. Moreover, what would be the process, if any, for filtering sites with insubstantial and invalid information? Who would be responsible for determining a site’s legitimacy? After all what purpose does it serve for you to have information inserted into your brain when in reality true knowledge is gained not simply by being exposed to an article, and blindly accepting someone else’s opinion to be fact, but by contemplating, critiquing, and having a personal reaction to that material. Only then can a person develop their own educated opinion on matter, and by doing so have learned just a little bit more about themselves.
I fear that society has already begun to become what Richard Foreman so astutely referred to as “pancake people’ —spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button”. Modern society is falling victim to this condition not only in how it is handles the internet but in how individual people are approaching their relationships, schooling, careers, as well as in their own personal thoughts. The internet has made society accustomed to having everything they could possibly need accessible to them with a mere click of their mouse. We have become a society which both demands and expects instant gratification. We have become multi-taskers. We have become infatuated with obtaining sheer quantity over quality. We want it all and we want it now. The internet is significantly responsible for promoting this way of life and in effect spoiling our society.
Though it is convenient to have such a vast amount of information so readily available on the web, societies new found dependence on the internet has caused people to become obsessed with receiving immediate results. The internet has subsequently robbed humanity of its patience and ability to focus on a single task for an extended period of time and patience that it formerly possessed. Individuals are now frustrated and perturbed when they are required to search beyond the surface level to find the answers they need. With everything coming so easily to the youths of today these students may not know how to approach and overcome a more challenging situations in their future when the answers are not already so plainly available to them. They do not know what it is to truly have to apply themselves to create and discover new solutions to problems. Students today seem to have lost sight of the fact that learning is about not just the end result it is about the process involved.
Our society’s current addiction to the internet is having an unhealthy and unnatural effect on people’s daily lives. We live in a the social order where kids spend much of their free time chatting over the net instead of interacting face to face, or playing video games instead of in their own backyards. Slothfulness is the last thing we need to be encouraging in a population that is already eating its way towards unprecedented dangerously high levels of national obesity. After all, exercise releases endorphins. Endorphins both enhance a person’s clarity of thought as well as provide them with a happier more positive outlook on life. Therefore it is crucial that we do not let the youth of today become overly dependent on this increasingly internet-centric way of life, or we will surely be putting both their physical, emotional and intellectual wellbeing at a serious disadvantage.
Additionally, when people are in fact going outdoors they are not experiencing nature in the same way that they used to. Individuals used to immerse themselves in nature either for the enjoyment of exploring the wilderness, letting their imagination run wild, or by simply to soaking up the silence, self-reflecting, and achieving peace of mind. Through many still embrace outdoors they are some how incapable of leaving their offices and their assignments behind them. My own mother is particularly guilty in this respect. When hiking in Colorado I dumbfounded by the numerous individuals I will come across checking emails on their blackberries or distraughtly searching for cell service nearly oblivious to the beautiful topography of the Rocky Mountains that surrounds them.
This is not the life I want for myself. I do not want my daily choices or activities to be dictated and determined by what sociologist Daniel Bell referred to as “intellectual technologies”. I want to have the freedom to be able to choose to not check my email for a day without having it result in my voicemail being over flown. I do not want to be accessible to everyone all the time. I aspire to have the time and space I need for self-reflection. I would like to be able to have a thoughtful conversation without a friend in which they do not check their email or sit through an academic class without hearing someone’s cell phone abruptly sound off. It saddens me that these sentimental moments and valuable conversations are constantly being interrupted and cut short by people’s inability to disconnect themselves from this increasingly internet driven world.