The Distracted, the Dishonest, and the Superficial: The Internet as an Engine of Ignorance.

I have become convinced that the Internet, as it exists today, is hostile to deep thinking, meaningful discourse, and, ultimately, democracy. It is worth mentioning here that, according to CNN, somewhere between 96% and 99% of the internet is really the so-called Deep Web, and most users never access it–the remaining 4% of the World Wide Web is mostly porn (15% or so, according to Forbes) and a considerable amount of misinformation. The effects of the Internet on thinking are still under debate, but undeniably, with three billion users worldwide, it is the single most pervasive medium for the myriad forms of human communication (and therefore thought) on the planet.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman describes two systems of cognition in his book Thinking Fast and Slow termed, somewhat aptly, System One and System Two. System One is fast, automatic, and stereotypic. It constructs simple stories based on little to no evidence (provided these stories fit with what one already believes), and it is confident in those stories if they are associatively coherent. For example, if the news reports a white police officer has shot a black suspect somewhere in this country, System One will, for many, immediately construct a story about racism because it confirms what they already believe. The facts may or may not support this story System One is telling us, but that story and the emotions accompanying it have real world consequences. System One is, therefore, the source of a number of cognitive biases because it deals associatively, emotionally, and (often) invisibly.

System Two, however, is effortful thinking; it is required in calculation, and it does mental work. It is also lazy, and very finite in its ability to process much of what human beings naturally feel, think, and experience. Kahneman’s example is that a person is like a newspaper, and System One is like reporters delivering stories which System Two, as editor, must sign off on– it either endorses a story or it detects a mistake and sends it back for further processing. By and large, a paper is guided by its reporters in terms of content, as a person is shaped and guided by System One.  Therefore we are all are largely guided by the more unconscious, flawed, emotional, associative and biased mental system. Our impulsive, quick-thinking self is prone to mistakes, and we are confident in those mistakes if they are in accord with what we already believe.

One of the wonderful things about books, in my opinion, is how it slows the reader down. A book, particularly a great book, is a deep meditation on a subject. One has time to ponder and reflect, or follow the thread of an argument or idea. The effects of a book are cumulative. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr comments on the difference between reading a book and “power browsing” on the Internet “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Books invite us to dive in and immerse ourselves fully in an idea. We are often engaged in effortful mental work (Kahneman’s System Two) when we are reading substantive books, and when we read, we descend on a vertical plane from beginning to end, cover to cover. It requires attention and focus to read a book.

The lateral, fragmented, attention-span depleting medium of the Internet is wholly unlike typographic media. The Internet as it exists today is an immediate, distracting, fragmented platform. Almost no Internet site is readable the way books are; inevitably there are ads, hyperlinks, multiple windows, additional tabs, etc. The point is speed and fragmentation, not depth and coherence. The internet value of immediacy is at odds with the typographic value of reflection. The internet value of multi-tasking is at odds with the typographic value of prolonged focus.

By dint of the Internet’s size, around 1.2 million terabytes, search engines must prioritize or “decide” what information to deliver to a user.  The solution was to develop algorithms, and those algorithms key to much more than just relevant search terms. In fact, as Eli Pariser says in his 2011 TED Talk,  Google, Facebook, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and almost every other major news source is delivering information based on age, sex, location, search history, and what a user has clicked on first in the past. In other words, the Internet is creating echo chambers wherein users see what they want to see, and their own understanding of the world is confirmed. “The impulsive self” as Pariser has it, (that is to say the self that does not deliberate but simply acts; the System One self) is building an echo chamber of its own biases in collusion with advertisers, news media hungry for clicks and “likes” and “shares,” and internet sites that want as many users to remain logged in as possible.

So, the Internet is full of distraction, and largely feeds into System One thinking, impulsiveness, speed, and a lack of deep thought. It is also the ascendant and pervasive medium for global news, communication, information, social interaction, etc.– but the Internet is full of misinformation, disinformation, spin, and propaganda. It is no coincidence that 2016 is being referred to as the beginning of the “Post-Fact” epoch. Newspapers have cut their fact-checking staff from hundreds in the mid-twentieth century to dozens or fewer in many cases. The Internet’s immediacy and speed, coupled with the advent of 24 hour news channels has made the cumbersome work of getting a story right a suicidal impulse for any news outlet. Witnesses to a mass shooting or a disaster can and do “tweet” the details of their situation in real time. To compete, news source have compromised accuracy and objectivity for pandering to a political demographic, and whenever possible, being first.

We are living in the dark future. We are living in a time when digital technology is rewiring our brains. In the Foreword of his prescient book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes of the competing dark visions of the future put forward by George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive of us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passvity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feels, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.” Consider in the light of Postman’s observations and Huxley’s fears, the culture that has coined the “selfie” and canonized the Kardashians. A culture that has elected as President of the United States a man like Donald Trump; a reality television star without respect for, or interest in, accuracy, reality, or truth. A culture that put forward a candidate like Hillary Clinton who told her donors it was important to maintain a public and private stance on matters of policy, and whose relationship to the truth could kindly be described as “mentioned when advantageous.”  Farhad Manjoo, in his book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, writes, “On the Web, television, radio, and all manner of new devices, today you can watch, listen to, and read exhaustive and in insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you; and indulge your political, social, or scientific theories, whether sophisticated or naive, extremist or banal, grounded in reality or so far out you’re floating in an asteroid belt, among people who feel exactly the same way.” The Internet’s filter bubbles and echo chambers are the reason so many are surprised (and hostile) when they are challenged by different ideas; they don’t encounter liberalism/conservatism/etc. online if they don’t want to, and if they do they can always “unfriend” and “block” the offending party, or retreat to a “safe space.”

I would like to put forward the suggestion that the Internet, as it exists now, is responsible for much of the superficiality, misguidedness, and incoherence at large in the world today. We are being conditioned to think in 140 characters, we are dumbing down or silencing real discourse, we are declaring our solipsistic ideologies or empty slogans  (necessarily without nuance) in memes, and we are being fed clickbait confirmation bias, and inaccurate/ incomplete misinformation or deliberate disinformation at almost every turn.

I am not sure how to address the problems I have raised in this (ironically internet-based) blog post, but I think the first step to solving a problem, cliched as it may sound, is to admit there is a problem. Democracy depends on well-informed citizens– it can’t withstand a pervasive global apparatus that undermines effortful deliberation, tells users what they wish to hear, occludes facts by overwhelming them, and unceasingly sells trivial, vapid, or false information. The hinges are beginning to rattle with the rise of Donald Trump, a man who is the incarnate love child of Manjoo’s Post-Fact Society and Postman’s vision of Show Business as Public Discourse. The genie, as they say, won’t go back in the bottle; we can’t return to a purely typographic world, or even the world of television as it existed through most of the 20th century. We are going to have to negotiate with this ascendant technology in a way that doesn’t leave us mentally and socially enslaved and ensnared by the World Wide Web.[image error]