Extended Mind and My Generation

Given its size (sometimes called "echoboomers") and consumer mentality, it’s not hard to understand why Generation Y is one of the most desirable targets for corporate marketers. It also is the most digitally active generation yet, with most being born plugged into internet and grown up around mobile technology. As Gen Y matures, it can be interesting to look at the question: “How will internet technology influence the way we think?” This question can be more complicating than it seems.

Some, such as Nicholas Carr have argued that being able to process the preceding question in its online form is a lot different than it would be if it were written down. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Carr brings up some relevant points about the altered way most of us process and interact with information on the internet.

Instead of the slow and “deep” thinking that book reading fosters, Carr brings in a recent study of online research habits through the University College London which suggests that we are in a period of change in the way we process information. Researchers found that people jumped from one source to another of digital information. This is similar to the process of our own daily research, where we interact with a hyperlinked web with distractions that flash us from one tangent to another. Carr argues, it is this that leads us away from developing our own deep personal associations and ideas.

And actually, changing the form of what we process is likely to have a deep impact, rewiring the very circuitry of our brain. After all, speech is more of an instinctive skill. Studies in reading show that symbolic characters are like an additional layer, first decoded by the occipital lobe and then taken to be associated to certain signified objects. Here meaning is finally translated in the normal route - through the temporal and frontal lobes. As an example, variation between languages that have an alphabet and those made up of ideograms (such as Chinese) have shown structural changes that extend across many regions of the brain – including those that govern memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. This all goes to suggest that the changes that come through internet reading can be even more different that those woven through book reading.

While reading on the internet is likely have changed the build up of how we think, in many ways it isn’t a bad thing for our generation. In an opposing argument titled How Google Is Making Us Smarter, Carl Zimmer has the last word. He cites philosopher’s Andy Clark and David Chalmers who in a paper titled The Extended Mind argue that we are all “natural born cyborgs.” The brain’s plasticity is a natural endowment that allows us to extend our mind into the tools we use – it doesn’t matter if that tool is a rake, a book, or access to the world wide web.

Instead of being some kind of hindrance, the net is a tool we can use to help us get a hold of more data. We are going through a process of adapting to this new environment. So while the output might change, it’s more likely to lead to the kind of results that the technology of the past such as the written word, or the printing press produced. In our postmodern world, we are faced with information that doesn't require us to process it in the same way as before - skimming is okay, even in "serious" research. An interesting study would be to look at if this glut of information has allowed American society overall to better question information than to accept it as truth. In the end, an algorithm is only as good as its programmer. It is up to us, and I’d prefer that option.