Just Enough, and Nothing More

It’s no secret that I love the internet. It makes today’s homeschooling so accessible, and it has created a whole different way to think about learning and information.

Yet, there is some question as to how this information is being distributed, and that it might be making us stupid.

The argument is that the nature of the internet gives us lots of information but not very deep information. It creates the facade that we know a lot, when in fact, we only are skimming the surface. “Deep dives” are discouraged by the mere fact that we lose interest in after reading the few paragraphs that will fit in the space of a screen.

The article also makes the point that content on the internet is not questioned as it should be, and is taken as equally valid, no matter what the source.

This argument has been made before about wikipedia and other user-created content. And, this argument has been made about TV.

Compared to other sources of media, is the internet making us stupid?

It seems to me, that the internet isn’t making us anything. It’s pure content, and how we use it is determined by our learning approach - it’s not the content that makes us stupid, it’s how we approach information in general that makes us stupid. We’re being made stupid by practices outside of the internet, and then we are applying it to the internet which has no boundaries.

For pretty much the history of humanity, news has been distributed by “authorities”. Newspapers, magazines, and TV pick and choose which stories to tell, how to tell them, and what “facts” to include and omit. For our entire existence we have believed what we have been told.

Yet, it has always been the case that news is regularly falsified, exaggerated, and spun. There is never enough facts to really understand what’s going on. Even when the news spends hours and hours of coverage on “big” issues, there is still so much that we don’t find out until much later, and then it’s not through normal news channels that we discover the underlying truths, but through where? The internet.

The internet may have a lot of information, and it may have a lot of crap, but it also is the first and only news source that has real, honest to God, in-depth information about pretty much anything you could possibly want to know about. Gone are the days where one has to be a scholar to know where to find details about the real lives of early American settlers, or what was really going on during Katrina. No longer do we have to wonder whether news reports are true; as soon as the news breaks, there is information available on the ‘net clearing things up. It’s all here. All you have to do is look for it.

I’m wondering if it is in fact schools that are creating this “skim the surface” approach to information. Kids don’t know how to do deep dives, or really, they just aren’t all that interested. They are interested in only getting the assignment done, not wasting time looking for something when they’ve already found it, and moving on to something more interesting. Perhaps it’s TV and radio that have taught our culture to have a short attention span, not to be able to wait for anything, and to have no real desire to know the truth - we’re so used to an “authority” telling us what the truth is, that when we get to the internet, we don’t have any tools for understanding the difference between a true authority and someone making up stuff.

I wonder, for kids who are growing up with the internet as their main information tool (i.e. homeschoolers), while at the same time being allowed to doubt, question and seek until they find a more complete answer, are these kids actually becoming smarter than everyone else because of the internet? Smarter than the teachers who are manning our schools, smarter than the parents who bought the DSL to hook them up, and smarter than the people who write articles about how the internet is making us dumb?

If the problem with the internet is that the authorities aren’t able to have a louder voice that everyone else, and that we don’t know how to weed through information, then what is the solution? How do we get information that is not filtered through the control of news generators without the internet? How can we be sure that the information gate keepers who have that special key are any better than we are at deciding which facts are “true” and which are “false”?

No, the internet is not making us dumb anymore than McDonald’s is making us fat. If we can’t use the internet in a smart way, and we can’t become smart when infinite information is available, then we certainly can’t be made smart by only being allowed to access certain kinds of information. If the internet is making us dumber, instead of smarter, then there is no hope for us as a race. Free information is the only way that we really can become smart. The only way that we really learn how to decipher what “good” information is, is to have to weed through all the crap to get there. Then we know the difference. If all we get is information handed to us on a platter and told what is good, and what is bad, we’ll never really learn on our own how to distinguish between the two, and when we are faced with something like the internet, we believe it all.