How the Internet is Making Us Smarter

If you look in any newspaper, watch a news programme on TV or even read news sites on the web, you’ll find plenty of people bemoaning the internet’s negative impact on our lives. It is making us socially isolated, self aggrandising, more intensely jealous of our peers, unable to perform the tasks our grandparents undertook daily and fat. In a lot of ways, that is true.

But the internet is making us smarter, too. Here’s just a few ways it’s doing that.

We can dive deep into topics, using materials from the most venerable institutions in the world.

Source

The most basic argument in favour of the internet’s positive influence on our intelligence is that we have all human knowledge at our fingertips, and we can learn at the feet of the most respected scholars in the world. Harvard University, MIT, Oxford and other international education institutions post videos on YouTube, they put up courses and lectures on Coursera.org, and they engage in discussions on discussion boards and various websites.

We approach knowledge as a web of understanding, rather than isolated subjects.

Since the age of the ancient Greeks, we have had people become experts. The world is too big to understand fully, so we had individuals specialise in one particular area. Then the rest of us could ask questions when we wanted to know that information, and then when we got an answer, we stopped asking. This worked when all of the world’s knowledge wasn’t easily accessible to everyone. Now compare that to how you use Wikipedia. You start off looking up the name of that guy who was in that thing, and before you know it, you are learning about grammatical mood or stem cell research. You’ve learned a little bit about a film star, science and grammar in the course of an hour.

When we do this, we actively see how connected knowledge is, and that is quite transformative.

We’ve begun to accept differences that can’t be settled are useful.

Source

When we relied on experts, what they said was considered to be the truth. But on the web, we are confronting disagreements more often. This doesn’t just mean flame wars and cyber bullying. It means experts in loads of fields can challenge the assumptions and ways of looking at issues the experts in another field hold. This leads to gigantic leaps in knowledge and understanding, as we’re starting to* argue to find clarity, rather than arguing to convince others of our own rightness.

*in more intellectual pursuits, sometimes. The argument about how to squeeze the toothpaste will always be a battle of right versus wrong.

Sharing lowers the barrier of entry to learning and makes the whole process faster.

Source

When you were at school, did you have a teacher who just could not get a concept across? Then, when you were older, a friend explained it so brilliantly that you’ve always remembered it? Traditional learning means that we rely on one person to explain something, and they can only explain it in a limited number of ways. With the internet, we can find thousands of ways to look at any issue. That means we initially understand more quickly, and the barrier to entry has been leapt. Then, when we have a question, we can just google it, enabling us to put that knowledge into practice much faster. The act of putting knowledge to action helps embed it in our brains, and hey presto, we’ve learned.

 

Yes, the internet makes it easier for us to become stupider in a lot of ways. Time-wasting sites suck our attention away from important issues. We can find like-minded people and end up being convinced of our own rightness because those people agree with us, not because we’ve researched a topic. When everything gets equal billing, it is hard to tell who is a real expert and who isn’t, and it’s hard to decide which subjects should take precedence. It has even been linked to a general loss of focus and the ability to form long-term memories.

But it’s also opening the universe up to everyone, so we can all marvel at its wonder and push the sum total of knowledge ever higher.

Now, please excuse me. I’m off to play Angry Birds.