How the internet is changing the way we think:

The Internet expands the horizon of every utterance or expressive act to a potentially planetary level. This makes it impossible to imagine a purely local context or public for anything that anyone creates today. It also de-centres the idea of the global from any privileged location. No place is any more or less the centre of the world than any other anymore. As people who once sensed that they inhabited the intellectual margins of the contemporary world simply because of the nature of geopolitical arrangements, we know that nothing can be quite as debilitating as the constant production of proof of one's significance. The Internet has changed this one fact comprehensively. The significance, worth or import of one's statements is no longer automatically tied to the physical facts of one's location along a still unequal geo-political map.

The internet offers us immediate access to a wealth of information. This has its benefits but it has a potential downside as well. The internet may be significantly changing the way we think and not necessarily for the better. Modern technology has given us the internet which has created a new way to access knowledge. With fair precision and almost instantly, we can find information on highly specific topics. No need to turn to our encyclopedias or dictionaries, or head to the library to find and research the pertinent literature to answer our questions. No need for the tactile experience of paging through books or magazines or jotting our hand-written notes on pieces of paper.

We no longer need to write things down. But writing notes to ourselves helps implant memories. Taking a greater effort to learn something helps implant memories. By using the new technology, we miss that. This is another way of saying that going in depth with a topic helps us learn it better. The more we focus our attention on something, the better we learn it. When we go in depth with a subject, we make a lot of neurological connections around it. But when using the internet, we rarely go in depth. Hyperlinks keep our minds moving and changing, going from one window to another, one distraction after another. Our distractions lead to more distractions which lead to even more distractions. By repeating this process over and over, our brains become hungry for rapidly changing information. 



- Genevieve Morris