What the Internet doesn't want you to Know

Upon completing necessary course-work for various academic studies and exploring my own interests, I have encountered several pieces of material that deal extensively with the matter of the Net's impact on the human social, psychological, and intellectual aspects. To say the least, I am very intrigued. When reading Nicolas Carr's The Shallows and Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, both very provocative titles on the effects of the Net on man, one can't help but encounter a certain dread, a certain loathing for the culture that technology has molded us into - a culture that feeds off the gossip of one's mostly fictitious successes and unneeded connectivity. And yet despite of our awareness to the erosion of humanity's social normalcy, we cannot so much as renounce a sliver of our usage of such technologies like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram; products that market themselves as social tools but isolate the user in actuality. Why do we do this? Why are we so infused and inseparable with an aspect of life only as new as 5, 6, 7 years old? Maybe its because these technologies take advantage of something inside of us - an evolutionary aspect of the subconscious human mind that makes us yearn for connectedness and networking.Or is it maybe that we like the efficiency of hand crafting a "virtual me" to show off to the world via Facebook: An online persona that shows our triumphs and the person we WANT to be rather than the person we actually are. This drive for connection and personal esteem tethers us to the unfortunate new culture of the net.

As humans, we crave intellectual stimulation. We crave exploring, wondering, discovering, and encountering. We crave interaction, stimulation, and occupancy; stagnancy is loathed and rejected in today's culture. For hundreds upon thousands of years we have sought this wondering and simulation by means of developing fire, cultivating agriculture, developing written language, composing beautiful art and musical compositions, and even walking on the moon. We wrote and created tools in our free time and we engaged in imaginative novel reading, alongside improving our environments. We were creators of information, interpreters of nature, and explorers of distant lands. What are we doing now? Does our natural curiosity drive us to see who's dating who on Facebook? Or to read about Kim Kardashian's third wedding? There is real damage to this new-age curiosity according to Nicholas Carr, a Dartmouth graduate and revered columnist. Carr describes a situation in which the formally quiet and reflective mind of the pre-information age transitions into a mind of "information hunting and gathering" with the net as the happy hunting ground. If all this information and new data is being streamlined to us with little to no work, don't you think the mind is going to take advantage and exploit that? How many of us have googled a piece of information more than once? How many feet are in a mile? What's the capital of Canada? How to cook hamburgers? Is it to no support that the Net is supplementing if not replacing the human memory capacity? Modern day academia is plagued with this brain-internet swap and its only getting worse. Schools for the first time are letting their students attend class with cell phones on and fully involved in the child's education. The insertion of these technologies has handicapped even the best students of the crowd - these students google information that they received and were expected to learn in class; they don't bother with this learning. I hear of my peers talking of having to google the formula for arithmetic sequences while in calculus class. And guess what? They do it again the next night. The same. Exact. Topic.

But it is not students alone impacted by this sudden implementation of worldwide communication and infinite access to information in their pockets. Adults - well educated, intelligent, affluent, and responsible adults are being molded just as bad as the kids, if not worse. The blackberry and the iPhone have become modern staples of the modern workforce with their implementation knows no bounds. These digital briefcases encompass every single tool a working man may wish to access. Need to ask a colleague about the report you're planning to do? Email's got it. Did you realize that you didn't finish that presentation that's due today while sitting in the Taxi Cab? "The Cloud" and your iPhone have your back. Emails and texts and presentation work and reports and IMing your wife and emailing some more and then texting some more. So while technology has undoubtedly enabled us to do more, to what quality are we doing those things that we are allowed to do more of? I've read countless accounts (and maybe you can testify to this too) of working adults that are so preoccupied with the use of their technology that they lose the task they initially set out to do. And if its actually inhibiting the quality of our productivity, don't you think its time to take it easy on the technology?

As stated above, Nicholas Carr as well as myself fear of the growing erosion of human deep thought. We both fear for the freedom of a drifting mind - a daydreamer and a reflector. These workmen and women on their devices twenty four seven don't have time to daydream and reflect. That time is spent on finishing that presentation in the back of the cab rather than actually stepping back and wandering in one's mind. We have become our machines meaning that most of the time we perform tasks and then perform more tasks. Our leisure time has become using this technology originally intended for work. We have become our machines and I think its time that we step back and try to become a little more human for a change. Free (at least temporarily) of the intellectual dependence we put on the Net and free of being as Sherry Turkle puts it: Alone Together. It is this limitation of technology and added human reflection time that I am advocating and it is my prayer and wish that you would step back, unplug, and think. Just you and your brain: the original human leisure time.