T echnology : the cause of negative neurological changes or an extension of oneself ? B S J Jessica Robbins Using an algorithm that scans the landscape of the blogosphere every few minutes in search of emotive phrases, the website We Feel Fine embodies the move- ment that co-creator Sem Kamvar refers to as “one of the most interesting shifts on the web,”—the rising desire of internet users to share “their whole life online.” (Kamvar, “An Almanac of Internet Emotion”). The website snatches up sentences containing the words “I feel” or “I am feeling,” then displays the results in a colorful and ever-changing collage of the human emotions that are becoming so inte- gral to the fabric of the internet. This increasing role of the internet in the way that people express themselves raises a fierce debate between those who usher in the tech- nological revolution and those that fear that increased reliance on the internet has profoundly negative conse- quences on the way people think and behave. While vari- ations in internet use can indeed affect the way people store, process, and express information, the interactions between humans and their increasingly intelligent tech- process informa- tion. Their fundamen- tal concern is that the internet, with its open door to an inundation of data and en- tertainment, hampers focus and prevents critical thinking. One of the primary proponents of this school of thought, author Nicholas Carr, claims that internet use alters thought patterns by intrinsically favoring the rapid acquisition of information that readers may not examine in detail, which in turn shortens attention span (Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”). He blames this phenom- enon on website designers, who cater their websites to be more favorable to advertisers. Every click of a mouse than an internet user makes while browsing the web acts as data point for advertisers, allowing them to amass in- formation about the interests of a particular website’s visitors. This allows for more targeted and effective ad- vertisements. Thus, advertisers tend to prefer web layouts that encourage quick browsing by provid- ing digestible portions of information that readers can consume quickly. The University College, London has doc- umented this diffusion of attention span in a recent study designed to understand how people locate information on the in- ternet. The study revealed several trends in the way that people conduct research using the web, including a tendency to “power browse” through a variety of sources without examining each one criti- cally for accuracy, relevance, or authority. This trend was especially prevalent among young people who had been conducting internet research for a greater propor- tion of their lives. Their findings show that people of all ages prefer reading more brief sources of information, preferring to read abstracts and other small paragraphs over full-length papers (Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”). While it is difficult to de- termine whether these changes in research practices are due purely to the proliferation of the internet, it is evident that it enables users to engage in a style of web browsing that favors the quantity of information amassed over the quality. It is this kind of enabling power that some believe open the door to shortened attention spans and lack of “This increasing role of the internet in the way that people express them- selves raises a fierce debate between those who usher in the technological revolution and those that fear that in- creased reliance on the internet has profoundly negative consequences on the way people think and behave.” nological counterparts are too complex for their results to be classified as entirely positive or negative. Indeed, this merging of the public and the private, the mind and the machine, has the potential to lend us profound insights inner workings of the human brain and spirit in a way that few other technological innovations can offer. The primary concern of those who warn against the rapid encroachment of technology is that it will somehow fundamentally alter the ways in which we absorb and 1 • B erkeley S cientific J ournal • E motions and T hought • V olume 15 • I ssue 1
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Feb 1, 2012
Neil Yorke-Smith + 3
Open Access
