Throughout
history, mankind has been discovering, seizing, and searching for new frontiers
to explore and conquer. Today, the
new frontier and hot topic is the Internet. Is it good or bad?
What effect does it have on its users? Will the Internet have a positive or negative effect of brain
development? Scientists are having
a difficult time studying the Internet and user behavior as much as they would
like to because technology is evolving so quickly it seems almost impossible to
keep up to date on it. This does
not mean that people have begun drawing conclusions about the Internet and its
effects on the brain. Mark
Bauerlein recently published a book called The
Dumbest Generation, in Generation
he claimed that the Internet has aided in the intellectual demise of America’s
youth. He states that instead of
broadening young people’s horizons, it has contracted their horizons to
themselves, more precisely to their immediate social scene (Bauerlein 12). I agree that technology has allowed
young America to focus more of their attention on the trivial twists and turns
of their own social scene, but the Internet has also broadened our ability to
learn.
Up
until this point in history, learning has been mostly been done with either reading
books or face-to-face interaction.
The invention of the Internet made learning new material has become
quick and easy, but not without some drawbacks. Positively, the Net delivers precisely the kind of stimuli
that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain
circuits and functions (Carr 116).
Digital natives, people who have grown up technology and the Internet,
have displayed greater creativity, more interactive learning, heightened visual
senses, faster neural shifting, just to name a few (Horstman 57). However, technology is a double-edged
sword, and by sharpening some thinking skills, it also undermines others. Those same digital natives have
displayed shorter attention spans and have a horrid multitasking habit, which
inevitably leads to a fall in the quality of their work (Horstman 58, Dretzin
2010). Digital immigrants, people
who are new to the Internet and technology, display similar affects after
having adjusted their minds to using computers. The brain and its learning capabilities, especially when it
comes to the internet can best be described as water that hollows out a channel
for itself that “grows broader and deeper; and when it flows again, it follows
the path traced by itself before. Just
so, the impressions of outer objects fashion for themselves more and more
appropriate paths in the nervous system, and these vital paths recur under
similar external stimulation, even if they have been interrupted for some time”
(Carr 20). The Internet is neither
good nor bad, it’s simply a new path for the brain to follow and explore. Internet ethics are up to the
user. The Net can be used for
positive experiences like businesses holding virtual meetings, or negative
experiences like excessive video gaming (Dretzin 2010).
As
of right now, there is no definitive answer as to whether the Internet is
wholly good or ungodly evil.
Without an answer, is it smart of us to be relying on the Internet as
much as our society does? Should we collectively withhold on becoming dependent
of a technology we do not fully understand, is it too late? Are we already knee deep in the tides
of the Net without fully understanding its consequences? I would like to end this paper with a
quote from the PBS documentary Digital
Nation: “technology isn’t good or bad, it’s complicated” (Dretzin 2010).
References
Bauerlein, M. (2008). The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans
and jeopardizes our future (or, don’t trust anyone under 30. London: Penguin.
Carr, N. (2010). What
the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company.
Dretzin, R.
(Producer/Director) & McNally, C. (Co-Producer). (2010). Digital Nation –
Life on the Frontier [Video]. United States: PBS. Excerpt retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/
Horstman, J. (2010). Scientific American: Brave New Brain.
San Francisco: Wiley.
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