The Internet makes you smarter, probably
It’s a debate that is unlikely to be resolved for generations: is the Internet making us, as a species, smarter or dumber?
Last summer, technology analyst Nicholas Carr published a piece in Atlantic Monthly claiming the Internet was at least changing our intelligence, if not precisely making us dumber. He claimed at the time that:
What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.
Carr’s sentiments have been debated ever since, and the Pew Internet & American Life Project has now conducted a study to try and gauge opinion amongst both experts and ordinary Web users.
Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center and co-author of the Pew study summed up the results thus:
Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.
Of the 895 people questioned, 76 percent disagree with Carr’s analysis, expecting the Internet to either have no effect on intelligence or actually increase it. Just 21 percent thought regular Web users would see their IQs lowered by the Internet. And I agree with the majority (at least I’m hoping they’re correct).
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February 22nd, 2010
The internet may make us smarter but it certainly isn’t helping our grammer lol
February 23rd, 2010
Internet usage may be improving our reading but I see writing skills like grammar and spelling taking a huge hit. Even without l33t speak and “LOL”-type acronyms, forum conversations and blogs are rife with errors that would be easily avoided by simply proofreading posts before submitting them.
Some of that is due to the ‘net’s international availability and that sites attract folks who have a different primary language. I’m discounting their errors and am only considering local/primary-language posters.