Is the internet making us stupid?

Internet DNA Podcast

A world of knowledge at our fingertips and we're watching cats fall off sofas. The internet and the way we consume data is actually rewiring our brain. This can’t be good. Or can it. Does memory give us a rich life and rich canvas from which to draw new ideas, or we can we use this knowledge and the rewiring of our to springboard into the future.

TRANSCRIPTION

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

Give me Abby and me, Dan. So you're in New York? I am indeed, yes. How is it? It's amazing. It's really, really funny. Cold over the last two days. And you had a really good day out being a tourist yesterday. Yes, I did. I walked the high line, then I walked off. Then I walked the Hudson park all the way down to the nine 11 Memorial and from there down to battery park and then basically back up what is effectively Broadway all the way back up, stopping off in the village and Tribeca just to be more touristy really. And eat something, a walk for eight hours yesterday. So this week we're going to talk about is technology making us stupid? And I especially like that a bit like when you said digital nomads riding the coat waves of poverty. This one, you said a world of knowledge at our fingertips and we're watching cats fall off sofas. I love the eloquence, but I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So we probably watch more rubbish than we should, but Hey, what's the problem? But the more I looked into it, the more it's fundamentally changing the way our brain works in terrify way, which is good because on this podcast we like to talk about terrifying futures, but there's quite a lot to say. And I wanted to start though by saying to you, is it making you more stupid? In some ways? My first contention is that it's just we're moving our memory from the way that we learn things. In some ways I don't remember things in the way that I used to because I don't have to from simple things like I used to know everybody's phone number. Oddly, I used to know everybody's a registration plate. I also used to remember money, more classes and function names and that sort of thing than I do now where I can just look them up. So it's almost that I, my brain has realized it doesn't need to know anything. It sort of needs to know how to stitch things together, but it doesn't need to know the details. And in many ways it is making me more stupid. I mean there's two things that interestingly most people say, no, it's not making me more stupid. It's making them more stupid. So that was really cool that you said no, I think it is making me motivated, but what we're doing is we can do things really fast and we know it's there and we know we can find it, which is great, but because we're looking at so much information and we're trying to multitask and our brain has to think about the links and the ads and make many decisions is exactly what you're saying. We're not committing the information to memory, which in the longer scale of things is quite scary because it's making us shallower and shallower. If we haven't committed information to memory when we're trying to be creative or have ideas or discuss a topic, we haven't digested the information to use to inform us about that topic that we're so we are not able to have proper conversations and new ideas because we haven't committed the information to memory. I mean I use the cat movies just because I think everybody would recognize that pupil spend a vast amount of time on the internet doing ultimately pointless things. Yeah, well, entertainment. One of the real problems I think of people were moving memory is that another way of looking at is as people removing history from their brain. So it's not that you can't look it up because of course you can look up history, but then history becomes, there's an old saying, history is written by the victors. What that means is that the, you only hear the story from the people that get to write history, who historically have tend to be in the victors of Wars. But now you're talking about people who get to control the story and they get to control history about, well, they're doing with it. And in the future we're not going to have so much history because been so busy consuming data that we haven't actually starts happening around us and having that deep within ourselves. So as a rich tapestry of a culture that we were talking about the other week there, multiculturalism or uni culturalism as we decided it should be, we won't have that. That's why when we talk about, Oh, it's so much froth and everyone's just more interested in ClickBank, then actually long form news that is all we will know. Yes, what you lose is the nuance and so it becomes very, very easy to control the story. If everybody's looking at it in a soundbite value, it's very easy to say, you know, I'm in New York so I'm going to use Trump, but in that Trumpian way of just throwing out sound bites constantly [inaudible] a true or B, they false. Just stick them out there because what happens is they stick in your mind whether you think they're true or not. One of the key ones is fake news. What it really teaches you that the whole idea of fake news is don't believe anything you hear or see and the danger of that is then everything can be true or can not be true. If you can't believe the sources it actually leads to or just a general cynicism and it becomes really worrying and as long term sense. So that's what I meant by it's making us more stupid, which is we don't know. The things we used to know. My worry as well is that we're going to get to the stage where we don't have the capacity to come up with new ideas because we can't reflect or be creative or come up with ideas for two reasons. One, we're not committing the information to memory, so we haven't got the resource for the ideas to come from and to, if you don't let your brain have downtime, so go for a walk listening to music or just sit and not be doing anything because light bulb moments come when you're not doing something and we don't let our brains not do things anymore. So yes, we'll have lots of ideas that are determined by data. The data only determined ideas from what's been before. That sort of crazy off the wall, out of the box thought that we have in that that a lot of things are built from will no longer be there and that a, it's the most exciting part of life, that excitement of this brave new world and B, it's so important that really worried me. And another thing is when we touched on where we were talking about children is it's really great to use the internet for all this information that's there. If we have a purpose, I'm going to go to the internet to research the second world war, but if we're just randomly flipping and swiping and doing tick taco, lucky at white cats and we have no purpose, then again, it's sapping our energy and our creativity. We're not going to try and gain anything from it by doing it. So you have to have a, like you said, an Instagram, have a purpose, have a reason to your feeds. Don't just let it snap your whole day. Yeah, yeah. Just a little example we got yesterday, obviously I was being a tourist, thousands and thousands of people taking pictures of themselves in front of stuff, which is another way and how you don't actually remember the day anyway because you're taking a picture, you're less likely to have remembered that moment. And I took those pictures, but I took pictures of the actual thing, not me in front of a thing because I thought what was interesting about what I was taking a of her off was obviously what it was, not my grinning mug stuck in front of something. I think that's what the internet is doing is they're becoming very egocentric. Yeah. It's all about self. And you lose the cultural interest of what you're actually looking at because it's more important to have you grinning in front of it than the thing itself. You know? I watch cats falling off, suffers as much as anybody else does, but I think the other thing is is that we're actually losing skills. You've been talking about the fact that we have the wealth of knowledge at our fingertips and I'm a great believer that this knowledge is amazing in the way that children learn because if we're trying to aim for the moon, we don't need to start on the ground. We can start halfway up because the technology is giving us a lot of the information to give us a push to start further on so that we don't need to do vote learning, we don't need to know our times tables. We need to use that information and springboard from there. So the interesting thing is how teachers are going to teach children when it's not all about having to remember facts. It's how to be creative, how to come up with ideas, applied learning. I think it is about memory. I think it is about learning. I think one of the things that has really helped me in my life is the fact that I read a huge amount as a young child about almost everything. And because you're reading, you really are committing to memory and it's given me a holistic ability to put bits together to say that over there is actually not that different from this thing over here, which looked like they're not the same thing. One's a and one's a way of city developed. They don't look the same, but actually your brain starts to make connections and so I think the memory is important. This idea that we don't have to remember anything anymore because we've got a phone. That's what you're saying is stops us from making those creative connections because there's nothing to connect to. There's just a [inaudible] connecting to another [inaudible]. There's nothing [inaudible]. Well, that's why we've got to learn on how to advance and use our brains in a different way because our brains are changing from the way that we're using technology. So maybe we don't need the memory. Maybe we do need to start in a different way. You said part of the reason that perhaps the internet is making us stupid because actually it's making us lonely. It's making us communicate less. That has a very much a knock on effect in the family we've just had half term. And I feel that technology creates a friction in that. I'm constantly telling my students to get off the screen and go and do something and they can't go and do something else unless they're prompted to, and that creates a friction between parent and child, which shouldn't be there. And then instead of using the family to discuss things, heal things, learn things, be a stronger, better person, that not talking to the family and they're going online to get results, which I think perhaps is making some of the anxiety and some of the destructive natures that young people are having happen. They're not using the strength of the family unit. Yeah. And they're not fixing it. They're not going on the internet to fix it. They're going on the internet to distract themselves. And that's why they watch cats falling off sofa. So why everyone's watching cats falling off surfers so they don't have to deal with, it's the same as that. They actually should deal with. It's not like people are going, Oh, hard. You know what? I'm a little bit having a conscious problem with this. I'm going to go on the internet and find out about it. They're like, Oh, I don't really want to think about this. Let's go watch a cat fall off the sofa. And that's the sort of distraction technique is the sort of same thing that I talked about. Fake news, which is it's this, let's just not deal with anything that's just live in this weird distracted world. And that's just where you're getting your friction from your children. Well, we're not really dealing with the undergrad. Yeah. But I think that it will improve. I think as you've said before, we're still in the wild West where you're talking. Yep. The speed of technology and how things are changing. Yeah. And I think in the whole world of technology, everything is moving so fast that we haven't caught up. We've talked about when the telephone came into place, it took nearly 50 years for everybody to have a telephone. Once the TV arrived, it took 1520 years for everyone to have a TV computers, probably maybe five years, but a mobile phone. I mean everybody had a smartphone within pretty much two years of the iPhone one which was the first smart phone ever. So there's latency going on. We just need time to catch up. We've just had not had the time to learn how to use these things in a constructive manner. I as well that what's making us stupid is we're not committing this information to our memory and we're not giving our brains the downtime to then reproduce this information and come up with new ideas. We're getting ideas from the data, but that's not new out of the box blue sky thinking. That's ideas from what has been before. So how do you think that what we can become less stupid using technology then than more stupid? Do you know what? I think that's going to be like a cultural thing. I mean the way you can do it is think about what are you actually doing on the internet? Are you sitting there watching? Are you sitting there watching cats fall off sofa? If you are, is that really better than going and seeing somebody or talking to somebody or going for a walk? Is it enriching your life? There's so much healing power of just going to talk to someone in person. If you go, I haven't got time to go and talk to them or I don't need to go and talk to them because I've been on my phone all day and I know exactly what they're up to. Say you're slightly isolated. Whereas if you make the effort to go and have that coffee, you come back feeling in Richt feeling happier and it wasn't a waste of time. What would you have been doing instead? I haven't got time to go and see this person. I'm too busy, but you can waste the time. I think you'd touched on it when we were talking about educating kids with technology. I think using all that information there for a reason, I must go and research the second world war and going and finding out information is a really, really good use, but not having a reason and just sort of fumbling around for hours that's making you stupid. And in the education system there's a real problem because they have all these apps, educational apps, but what they seem to be doing these apps is drawing a distinction between the internet and learning. If you want to learn, you have to go on these apps and some of them actually aren't that bad, but it creates a mental disconnect with the children between, because they're like, Oh, I need some screen time. You're like, you've been on a screen for an hour there, but that was homework and it's creating this disconnect between how you use the internet and how you learn. And for people like me from an older generation, I use the internet to learn. I've watched my fair share of cats, but what I do on the internet in my free time is watch documentaries on the things that I'm interested in. Yeah, it's important though when you're looking and researching as well. I'm always telling my children not to look at two screens because you're not getting anything from either of them. The whole multitasking is proven that you're achieving less and so if you're going to watch a film, watch a film, be part of it, get into it. If you're on another screen as well, you're not going to get anything from either of them, which actually there's been a whole talk recently on people watching or listening to things on double time. I mean that's unbelievable. If you're saying that all this information Justin from one of the other is meaning that we can't commit it to memory. Consuming data at double time means really not gonna remember, I just don't know why people feel that they have to get so much stuff in. Oh, okay. So I do listen to one channel in particular, not on double time. I listen for 1.25 so like a quarter speed it up because the guy has got such a slow voice that there's a part of my head that is going, wow. I mean he can say this a lot quicker. This thing I've noticed, I've also do recently is I've actually stopped watching. I've just put my headphones on and I sit on the sofa or wherever I am and I just listen. I just listened to it and I find I pick up way more information. You're looking at watching. There are occasions where they'll talk about, Oh, and if you look here then I'll go and have a look on the screen and I found that that's made me pick up and understand what I'm listening to a lot more than even if it's just staring at the bloke talking at me. It doesn't add any value to get less stupid to get more clever. But I think on the other side of that, I worry that the cinemas are becoming, uh, films are becoming more bland and more noisy just to let you have the time to sort of check your phone or not. I've actually missed anything, but the nuance is going from things that actually having to concentrate the enjoyment from concentrating for me. Yeah. Well I'm hopefully going to go and see the Irishman tonight, which is three and a half hours. That's going to challenge even me to concentrate. Well, apparently our concentration span has dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds, which I'm sure I can just chat a bit longer than eight seconds, but I think I can do about eight hours. No, I think that's just not true. I think that's exactly you especially in fact count like concentrate at all. And because you're creative, your brain is constantly bubububuh due to to wandering around looking at stuff. So like when you draw a red circle, it's immediately stopped worrying about drawing it and it's off thinking about red circles and circles and red things and Oh well maybe the did we not. Uh, and when they talk about that length of concentration while they're talking about, is that an absolute pure, not letting your mind wander sitting absolutely on people's ability to do that really is decreasing. Eight seconds when I meditated does for quite a long time. Yeah. But if our culture is getting shallower, if all this quick licking around and in fact I think advertising has a lot to answer for us becoming stupid because all the links or the ads are making our brains having to make split second decisions all the time so we're not able to focus and commit to memory long form information and then we're not even been offered long form information, Twitter things, which is a shame because for me the exciting thing in life, the challenge and things is coming up with new ideas is not just being fed information. It's actually taking the time out and really having to think things through and if we're losing that deep ability, we'll lose a certain enjoyment in life as well. Whenever I'm just thinking about this type of topic or I think of the film Wally, because it just shows what happens if you become a completely passive consumer of stuff rather than an active creator of things and what do you become? Well, have you not watched it become a, it's basically a blob in a seat watching a screen being fed commercial nonsense and totally not connected either with human beings or your environment whatsoever. Don't make you happy. No, we've seen, you know, there are people, yeah, there are people who are going, we all just sleep walking into a nightmare because you can't be bothered to make a decision. So actually think about things and whether she's right or she's wrong, she's at least thinking about it and being active. I would like to do a podcast on decision making, paralysis as it's another thing that started to take hold of the world and whether that's been brought on by the internet, I don't know. But perhaps that's the podcast for next week. I think we should go now. You need to go and enjoy an amazing breakfast in the fortnight, fortnight.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.