The Internet makes us stupid

Every time a report comes out that American students are falling behind their peers around the world on standardized tests, or some survey shows that less than half of young Americans cannot find Iraq on a world map, television and the Internet is cited as one of the causes for our stupidity.

An article in The Atlantic Monthly describes how the Internet is diminishing our need for critical thinking better than I can say it. We really do think differently when we have a vast and instant database of facts and knowledge at our fingertips. It can improve the speed and reach of our research and makes tracking down a famous quote or obscure fact really simple and quick. But our thinking and reasoning becomes more shallow and sporadic. It’s much easier to be lazy and spend less time and energy doing critical thinking when the Internet is now an extension of our brains. One of the reasons historians provide for Abraham Lincoln’s intelligence was the fact that he holed himself up with books as a student and young adult and spent long hours writing, thinking, and developing his own thoughts and opinions. I try to do the same, but there’s so many more distractions in our world today.

I depend on the Internet for everything. It is invaluable when you live abroad and have no other access to news from home, and when e-mail and voice chats are the cheapest and easiest ways to keep in touch with people are far ways. I have little need to make international phone calls, but when I do, I use Skype and call the U.S. for pennies a minute. And when I need to look up a word or grammar rule, or I run out of ideas for my 150th class, the Internet is where I turn to. But it means I sit and think less, and depend too much on external thoughts and do not develop enough of my own. My students are so addicted to their cell phones and electronic dictionaries. Some of them simply cannot read an English book or essay without their dictionary at hand, and they are reluctant to guess new words from context.

In an unrelated note, I noticed a review of 25 root beers in the New York Times, and Sprecher’s root beer came out on top!

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Consider this blog post evidence of the merits and drawbacks of instant access to everything on the Internet. In between writing this post and trying to think deeply about the connection between knowledge and our new digital world, I read some news headlines, listened to part of an audio book that I downloaded last night, checked my e-mail, and learned about the world of specialty root beers. Multi-tasking probably slowed me down, but all that information got my brain going at 7 a.m. and kept me up-to-date on the world. No where else could I get such breadth and variety of information.