You Are All Wrong, The Internet Told Me So!

 Before the widespread use of the internet we gathered information through traditional means.  The library was a repository of reference materials, books on the subject, and archives of periodicals.  You would use the traditional means of information gather to research the past.  To monitor the present state of affairs, one would rely on a few television news programs, magazine subscriptions, and the choice of many local and national newspapers.  These sources of information were reliable, and you could confidently know who you were getting your news from.  I grew up in a household that received the daily paper, The Washington Post, and I remember the smell of the paper on a hot day.  I have memories of reading the paper until my hands turned blue from the ink.  There is something so intimate about holding the news in your hand.  I also recall the first time I experienced the loss of a favorite journalist.  I always read his editorials first, and I had come to understand some parts of the world through his words, and with his passing, I felt I had lost a teacher.  Journalism used to mean something.  Like a priest gives his life to God, journalist used to give their lives to the pursuit of the truth. Today the competition for advertising revenue has changed media.  It started with cable and satellite TV, but the nail in the coffin was the advancement of the internet in the 80's and 90's. The Internet created too much competition for the traditional media outlets, and their refusal at first to embrace the internet into their business models was their undoing.  With the expanding competition from the internet, the product was watered down, sensationalized, and delivered with less information and more fear and has made us dumber.

A simple Google search on the topic, "does the internet make us dumber?", will show you that there are many opinions on the subject. One of the most challenged theories is one presented by Nicolas Carr, with his article in the Wall Street Journal, "Does The Internet Make You Dumber?" Carr contends that the use of the internet has changed the way we use our brains.  Many of his critics forget this when they argue that the internet gives us more choices, and more content.  I can take you to the finest library in the world, but if you can't read and understand the words on the page it would be useless to you.  This is what Carr contends we are doing to ourselves as we continue to use the internet for information gathering. He cites research from neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who believes, "our brains are being "massively remodeled" by our ever-intensifying use of the Web and related media." Research shows that power-users of the internet are more distracted, and have a decreased ability to store the information they are exposed to. 

Some will contend that this is a question of how to judge and measure intelligence. In his article in Psychology Today, "Is Technology Making Us Stupid (and Smarter)?", Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D. explains that the internet with all of it's complexities, actually makes complex problems easier to solve. Tomas says that with the use of the internet we have molded our minds to work like the smartphones and the tablets we use.  We no longer rely on our minds to store the information we seek out, but only to remember where to find it. Our brains are turning from encyclopedias to card-catalog systems(Not many of you will get that).

As a web designer and social media consultant for the past 15 years I have a more expanded knowledge of the internet that most consumers.  When building a website for a client, my services often include ways to code the website that will artificially move that website to the top of the search engines.  Every day Google changes their analytics to make their search engine more efficient, and everyday webmasters change their code to keep up.  Because of my work with website building and search engine optimization, I know that the first returned results from a search are not always there because they deserve to be.  The search engines do not rank the results of a search based on the truthfulness of the source, or the relevance to the subject you are researching.  Instead the pages that pop up first most likely have the most hits on the keyword you were searching, are linked to more websites than other sites, and have added relevant copy to their image tags.  These simple tricks can take a website from page 20 of a Google search to page 2 or 3.  Research shows that many people do not click past the 3rd page of results, so with a little bit of work you can get your website in front of someone.

While the internet opens up the world of information to use at the snap of a finger, we need to be conscious of how it it delivered to us.  The traditional ways were safe, and slow to change.  The internet allows us to read from many sources and digest many different points of view.  It is important to remember that the websites are making money on your clicks, and they may look credible because they were on the first search results page, but that could be artificial.  I believe that the internet can make us as smart or as dumb as we dream to be.

Additional Reading: (Topic:Racism and Media) http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/02/27/what-causes-inequality-systemic-and-individual-frames-for-racism-in-media/