A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.

The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. In this report, we cover experts’ thoughts on the following issues:

• Will Google make us stupid?
• Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
• Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
• Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?

Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

The Digital Literacy Contest is a competition to search the internet. Students have 30 minutes to answer questions. Correct answers are rewarded, and incorrect answers are penalized. The winners get cash prizes. Universities like Brown, Cornell and Northwestern host the contest for their students. Here’s a demo.

Interviewing Contest Winners

Our team interviews the winners of these contests in-depth. We want to understand why they are so gifted. What can they teach others? What are their favorite websites, tools and techniques? Over the years we have interviewed 100+ winners.

A Primer Based on these Interviews

We created a 30 page primer on digital information literacy based on these interviews. In fall 2009 we piloted this primer with a professor at Purdue University. She used it to teach 115 students how to find, evaluate and synthesize information online. This spring we updated the primer, and the same professor is using it again.

Want to Use the Primer?

Contact me if you are interested in using this primer: daniel.poynter@gnic.org or (765) 588-3620

GNIC hosted essay contests across the U.S. and Canada in fall 2009. Part of the prompt was:

[How does the internet change our] intelligence - our memories, attention spans, as well as our abilities to focus, reflect and synthesize? Specifically, shape your argument as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? and Jamais Cascio’s Get Smarter… [more]

Elizabeth Gabel is a student at Pennsylvania State University. You can contact Elizabeth at elizagabel [@) psu DOT - edu.

Elizabeth Gabel’s Essay

“The instant gratification of the internet can be alluring.  It is a source for quick answers requiring limited thought.  A simple search can reveal analyses of works and a variety of facts.  With cyberspace offering us so much for so little, we become spoiled and abstain from important types of thinking.  If it is easier to search for an explanation of a topic online than to create a unique take on it, people are less likely to bother thinking it through.

Take, for example, a mathematical formula built out of basic concepts.  If one knows the fundamental formulas, it is possible to manipulate and combine them to form the desired equation.  However, it is quicker and requires less thought to simply find the final formula on the internet.   This removal of the necessity of cognition invites mental laziness whereas needing to figure out methods and problems oneself invites mental growth.  Even just to find simple facts, it can be a mental exercise to try to find them in one’s memory.  This simple opportunity is lost if one simply searches for the answer online.

Since it takes more time to solve problems and recall facts independently, people with internet access may find it easier to use others’ findings online than come up with their own.  Therefore, the web can inhibit mental exercise and growth if used too frequently.  This is not to say that the internet cannot be used to share new information and ideas to which others can then respond and build off of, but used too often it can remove vital mental practice and decrease the resulting potential intelligence.”

GNIC hosted essay contests across the U.S. and Canada in fall 2009. Part of the prompt was:

[How does the internet change our] intelligence - our memories, attention spans, as well as our abilities to focus, reflect and synthesize? Specifically, shape your argument as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? and Jamais Cascio’s Get Smarter… [more]

Alex Goldman is a sociology PhD candidate at the University of Florida. He works at the Bureau of Economic and Business Research. You can contact Alex on his website.

Interview with Alex Goldman

Part 1

Part 2

Alex Goldman’s Essay

“As I was lying in bed the other night, I allowed myself to wonder what the biggest change in human society has been since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  One of my first memories is of visiting Epcot’s Tommorowland with my father around that same time and daydreaming about the flying cars that were then already ten years overdue by 1950s predictions.  It seems to many people that humanity has made strikingly little progress on these kinds of tough technical problems - witness the continued doomer/boomer debate over environmental issues.  Yet, we should be glad that information and communication technology (ICT) innovations are clearly where we have made the greatest progress.  Intensive users of Internet tools simply live lives very different from those of non-users.  I would argue that the lifestyle gap between East and West Germans twenty years ago was actually less than that which currently exists between so-called “digital natives” and those who have not yet embraced the ICT revolution.  It is not that they understand their societies in a fundamentally different manner, or that they are somehow exempt from basic human tendencies and market forces, but that they interact with the world in a wholly different manner.  Just look at how differently mobile phone “refusniks” must plan and navigate their social lives to stay in step with those who use this increasingly ubiquitous technology.  Just think about the ways in which dating behavior, and not just in urban/liberal areas, has been altered by text messaging.

My father was bullish on the future, and especially on early PCs.  Like many people, my parents believed that the then dominant forms of entertainment did not help one grow intellectually, but computers did.  Thus, television was restricted, video games were banned, and spending hours on the computer was encouraged.  Even at ten years old, I knew these were fatuous distinctions.  Granted, by all appearances it must have looked like I was training for future white-collar employment, but this was mostly an illusion.  Fantasy baseball leagues on Prodigy were a neat supplement to watching or playing the game, but they would not improve my understanding of statistics.  Real-time strategy games would not make me a brilliant military strategist.  I feel compelled to point out that while Playboy magazine does in fact come bundled with some good writing, Internet porn never does.  The bulk of what I learned about mental engagement with others (what I call “arguing the world”) didn’t come from electronic media, but from being forced to reading the local paper with my parents and discuss almost everything I read.  Today, I’m reading more than ever, what with all those RSS feeds and free access to Google Books.  Yet this increased intake has done little to improve my ability to engage with ideas at higher levels.  Despite not being free to read with the breadth of a digitally-enhanced Westerner, I must admit the distinct possibility that my mind might have been better off in East Berlin.”

GNIC hosted essay contests across the U.S. and Canada in fall 2009. Part of the prompt was:

[How does the internet change our] intelligence - our memories, attention spans, as well as our abilities to focus, reflect and synthesize? Specifically, shape your argument as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? and Jamais Cascio’s Get Smarter… [more]

Allie Conti won first place at the University of Florida. She studies English, Journalism and Religion, and she was an Opinions Editor for the The Independent Florida Alligator. You can contact Allie on her website.

Audio Interview

Allie Conti’s Essay

“Netflix subscribers can now stream an unlimited amount of videos online with their subscriptions.  Instead of increasing the time I spend watching movies, though, I’ve found that this new service mostly increases the amount of time I spend clicking through movie descriptions and reviews. I add movies to my “virtual queue” that I never watch. I am a collector of hypothetical cinematic experiences. A lot of the times I end up watching nothing simply because I can watch everything.

Likewise, instead of immersing myself into a book, I sometimes find myself skimming through endless Wikipedia chains. Starting with a biography of Richard Wright, I’ll notice that I’m reading about John Keats’ theory of negative capability and wonder where the time went. Instead of this being a byproduct of a shortened attention span, this is simply a different type of learning, distinct from deep reading.

Simply put, there are two manners of acquiring knowledge that work in concordance with one another. To take from the title of an Iggy Pop song, I could call one “searching” and the other “destroying.” Searching involves researching topics to delve into, and destroying is the mastery of a specific, narrowly tailored topic.

The Internet is augmenting our ability to think because it allows us to find more things to think about. To respond to Nicholas Carr’s statement about how “staccato thinking” prevents once-voracious readers from completing novels–  ”staccato thinking” and “deep thinking” are mutually exclusive, but they are different sides of the same coin. As a literature enthusiast, I use “searching” to whet my appetites and then “destroying” to tackle works that seem especially worthy of my time.  As a journalist and an editorialist, I use “searching” to find stories and “destroying” to focus in on a topic I want to localize. Instead of dampening my abilities to analyze information, the Internet provides me with an unlimited amount of topics to analyze. I must still use critical thinking to choose which topics are most relevant or important; once I am done scanning, I must switch to a different kind of thinking in order to “zero in.”

If anything, the Web has changed the way we think without erasing the ways we used to think before the age of the hyperlink. One could even say the Internet acts like a derailleur on a bicycle in a form of cognitive aerobics. Yes, I add many movies to my “instant queue” that I’ll probably never watch, but that doesn’t mean I lack the attention span to sit through them. Exploring a vast library of movies, or of any knowledge, is not a waste of time or a sign of technologically induced ADD – it is a form of augmenting one’s awareness of what exists  in order to appreciate something truly worthwhile when it is discovered, whether it be through human “fluid intelligence” or through the help of a artificial focusing assistant.”

…the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath…

Will all this change what it is like to be human? Will it change what consciousness is like? There must be people out there who study teenagers who have lived in this environment all their life, and they should be the one to tell us. The only teenagers I know well are my grandchildren, and that is not enough of a sample. They use computers a lot, but it has not made them very different. Of course they read much less, and they have a sense of how knowledge is organized that I can only envy — I keep being frustrated by how much better young people are at the task of searching. -source

Our Digital Literacy Contest tests how well people find and evaluate information online. These are only two parts of ‘digital literacy.’ What about synthesizing?

This fall we’re offering $250 in cash scholarships for a (very short) essay contest. Deadline Fri Nov 13, 2009. Open to all current students at these universities (not just those involved in the Digital Literacy Contest). Here’s the official prompt:

We’re the first generation to grow up immersed in cyberspace. How does this change intelligence - our memories, attention spans, as well as our abilities to focus, reflect and synthesize? Specifically, shape your argument as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? and Jamais Cascio’s Get Smarter. Argue persuasively and concisely in 300 - 500 words. Educators and policy makers need to know what our generation thinks about this issue. Tell them.

Email completed essays to Daniel.Poynter@gnic.org. Our team will select one winner from each of these five universities. Each winner will be mailed a check for $50. Formatting of text doesn’t matter. University staff are welcome to participate but are not eligible for prizes. All submitted essays will get a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license, and the best will be put online:

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

You may also wish to use/reference this background material:

• The Machine is Us/ing by Michael Wesch
• Future of Humanity: A Map of the Conversation by Daniel Poynter
• Savages, Cyborgs and Saints by Dan Novack
• Blogosphere discussion spurred by Jamais Cascio and Nicholas Carr
• Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society by Adam Thierer

Good luck! =)

Where is humanity going? Our technology empowers the individual, but to what end? This is a (growing) list of people, institutions and concepts central in this discussion of technology and our future (from where I stand).

I’m very familiar with everything listed here. I’ve read the articles/books, watched the movies, and sometimes even met the people. Use this list to jump into the conversation. We need you.

More from Future of Humanity: A Map of the Conversation

technorati tags: philosophy, resource, toread, society, future, transhumanism, transhuman, technology, posthuman, people, concepts, institutions, philosophers, authors, writers, films

I led a session called ‘Brainstorming Brainstorming’. 15 of us collaborated and created How to Brainstorm.

I also got to meet Gabe Wollenburg and James Carlson. Gabe MCed the event and kept an electric joy in the air. James was another organizer of the event, and he’s the inspirational force behind Bucketworks - “the world’s first health club for the brain:”

It’s a place and a methodology for directly connecting people to one another and to the wider world through their values and passions, so they transform their community. It’s a local place with a global strategy, because if we build healthy localities, our whole world will grow. We focus on the individual first, because until someone understands their values and their passions, they’re not likely to join in sharing interest in the wider world…

In the last five years our 700 members have created 28 new companies, 65 new jobs, a highschool, a student film festival, 7 theatre companies, 3 technology companies, and innumerable pieces of art, items for sale, performances, gatherings, shows, and events–there were over 863 events at Bucketworks in 2006.

I love meeting these people. =)

technorati tags: bcmke4, barcamp, milwaukee, conference, unconference, technology, event

UPDATE: I asked Jamais for comments on the outline below on 10/3/09. I wanted it to reflect his intentions. He was kind enough to reply at length, and I’ve updated it accordingly.

Claims

What are the main claims or arguments in the text?  What is the author’s main point?

• We humans calculate short-term risks well, but we calculate subtle, complex risks poorly
• We must consciously increase our intelligence to survive the existential crises facing our species (e.g. peak oil, pandemics, global warming)
• We can consciously increase our intelligence (i.e. sophisticated foresight, detailed analysis/insight, “augmented awareness”)
• Technology (e.g. genetic engineering, artificial intelligence) will bring significant risks in the next few decades
• We have already augmented our minds (e.g. written language, printing press, radio, telegraph, caffeine, nicotine)
• Information overload strengthens our minds. It increases our “fluid intelligence” and increases our ability to see patterns
• Cyborgs are not far in the future - they are already here (i.e. we use our technology as a mental prosthetic)
• There will be a “pharmacological arms race” as people use Provigil, Ritalin, Aderall and other neuroceuticals for a competitive edge

Logic

How does the author reach these conclusions?  What are the steps in the author’s reasoning or logic?  Is this logic sound?

1. Our species is threatened existentially (e.g. peak oil, pandemics, global warming)
2. We were threatened existentially in the past (e.g. radical climate changes in the past 2 million years), and we evolved to meet those challenges (i.e. by developing sophisticated language and the ability to plan)
3. Therefore, we can evolve to meet our current existential threats

Assumptions

Does the author rely on hidden assumptions?  If so, are these assumptions correct?

• Evolution can be conscious
• We know what ‘intelligence’ is (i.e. sophisticated foresight, detailed analysis/insight, pattern recognition, etc.)
• The benefits of modifying neurochemistry and genetics outweigh the risks
  
• We are threatened existentially
• Intelligence is why we survived past threats
• The internet is “exo-cortical technology” (aka a mental prosthetic)

Evidence

What evidence does the author present to support the argument(s)?  Does the author offer enough evidence?  Is this evidence convincing?  Can you think of any counter-evidence that would challenge the author’s claims?

• Neuro-enhancing pharmaceuticals (e.g. many professionals are taking Provigil to stay alert and some students use Ritalin and Aderall to study)
• The “hive mind” of the internet
• Information visualization spawning new scientific domains

Alternative Arguments

Can you think of alternative arguments that the author has not considered?

• The Internet is not a “hive mind.” See Jaron Lanier’s criticism of this idea in his article The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.
• We do not know what intelligence is so we could never increase it consciously. See Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.
• Cascio does not address human fallibility sufficiently. Tinkering with such fundamentals as genetics and the brain is likely to cause large, unpredictable problems. UPDATE: Jamais responded to points like this, “Print has restrictions on content that are quite frustrating for digital writers. For example, I was limited to 5000 words initially, but was asked to pull that back to 4,500 words by the time the piece was finished. There’s quite a bit that goes missing in that context; when wondering why I didn’t mention topic X, a reader needs to ask herself/himself what existing content should be removed to make enough room to give topic X its due (and to integrate it into the rest of the piece).”
• Cascio’s view of evolution could be construed as Lamarkian. See Lamark’s example of a giraffe. That is, he thinks an individual can consciously alter evolution. The modern Darwinian synthesis states evolution is without direction, and individuals can not force their evolution. UPDATE: Jamais responded to this point specifically, “I’d push back a bit on the characterization of my views on evolution as Lamarkian. The phrasing suggests that I’m rejecting the Darwinian synthesis; the reality is that modern humans, due to our technosocial development, are in the unique state of being able to actively change our characteristics, and are not solely subject to random mutations and environmental changes. Moreover, much of what I talk about in the piece could be considered social-technological coevolution, where our tools evolve along with us. That’s essentially memetic evolution (as in Dawkins‘ construction of memes).”
• Conceiving of the internet as “exo-cortical” technology is incorrectly reductionist. The brain and mind are not mechanistic like the internet. See “Problems with (biological) reductionism” in the free, online Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Also see thinkers like anti-reductionists like Jaron Lanier and James P. Carse (especially his book Finite and Infinite Games).
• Even if individuals could freely direct their evolution, Cascio doesn’t give adequate historical context for the idea: UPDATE: Jamais responded to this point above. The Atlantic imposed a 4,500 word limit.
• (1) Many authors in the Western canon (e.g. Hobbes, Adam Smith, Hayek, etc.) think systems (e.g. law, institutions, subconscious body language, the market, traditional morality, and all traditions in general) contain more “intelligence” than even a genius could possess. For example Isaac Newton said he “stood on the shoulders of giants.” This is how writers with a “constrained” view of human nature see knowledge, according to Thomas Sowell in his book A Conflict of Visions. On the other hand, authors with an “unconstrained” vision (e.g. Gilbreath, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, etc.) think the opposite - brilliant individuals have a lot of “intelligence” and are justified in altering traditions significantly. People with a constrained vision of human nature do not think any individual, council or generation has, as Cascio puts it, the, “capacity to understand the complex relationships of the world’s systems.” This view is the practical, non-religious origin of the cliche, “we shouldn’t play God.”
• (2) Humans taking radical control of their evolution is not a new idea. Taking such conscious control of evolution requires making specific decisions. These decisions require valuing certain genetic structures (as in the case of genetic engineering) or brain states (as in the case of nootropics like Provigil). Our species has a history of thinking too simply in this regard. As examples see religious persecutions, the politics of ‘insanity’, the eugenics movement and a myriad of genocides. In Straw Dogs John Gray writes, “This Nazi project was dealt with by Arthur Koestler in his wartime novel Arrival and Departure. Koestler gives one of its characters, a philosophizing Nazi of a kind that really existed in many parts of Europe at that time, a speech giving full vent to Nazi aims:

‘We have embarked on something - something grandiose and gigantic beyond imagination. There are no more impossibilities for man now. For the first time we are attacking the biological structure of the race. We have started to breed a new species of homo sapiens. We have practically finished the task of exterminating or sterilising the gipsies in Europe; the liquidation of the Jews will be completed in a year or two. Personally I am fond of gipsy music and a clever Jew amuses me in a way; but we had to get rid of the nomadic gene, with its asocial and anarchic components, in the human chromosome…. We are the first to make use of the hypodermic syringe, the lancet and the sterilizing apparatus in our revolution.”

• This murderous vision was not confined to Nazis.” Gray writes. “In less virulent forms, the same view of human possibilities was held in the thirties by much of the progressive intelligentsia. There were some who found positive features even in national socialism. For George Bernard Shaw, Nazi Germany was not a reactionary dictatorship but a legitimate heir to the European Enlightenment.” (93-94) UPDATE: Jamais wanted to be clear he wasn’t talking about eugenics in his Atlantic article. He wrote, “If anything, I’m arguing for *more* diversity, not a purification/ordering of the species (as in eugenics) or anything worse.” I still include (2) above not to accuse Cascio of sympathizing with eugenics but to remind the reader of one simple fact: the destructive energies in humanity look for the slightest intellectual justification. This may just result in faster, more cannibalistic economic competition or it may cause a modern genocide to eclipse all genocides. In my opinion the transhuman community has not yet shown adequate awareness of the ease with which our tinkering could let loose unimaginable ferocity.

technorati tags: society, technology, intelligence, internet, transhumanism, singularity, philosophy, theory, genetics, ai, computers,