

How the Internet is Making Us Less Creative - jmm
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/jim-holt/smarter-happier-more-productive

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keiferski
For the impatient, skip to the end of the article.

 _It is the connection between memory and creativity, perhaps, which should
make us most wary of the web. ‘As our use of the web makes it harder for us to
lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and
more on the net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory,’ Carr
observes. But conscious manipulation of externally stored information is not
enough to yield the deepest of creative breakthroughs: this is what the
example of Poincaré suggests. Human memory, unlike machine memory, is dynamic.
Through some process we only crudely understand – Poincaré himself saw it as
the collision and locking together of ideas into stable combinations – novel
patterns are unconsciously detected, novel analogies discovered. And this is
the process that Google, by seducing us into using it as a memory prosthesis,
threatens to subvert._

~~~
knome
They also point out how difficult it is to keep abreast of the increasing
amount of information humanity is generating, and how the Internet assists in
rapidly accessing this information. It seems that if ingenuity requires vast
knowledge of disparate topics, trolling through the Internet's wide seas of
information would be only beneficial to the cause, giving ever larger sets of
ideas for mental recombination. I expect creativity will weather this age
without tarnish.

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pjscott
All this talk about "outsourcing our memory to machines" sounds like a load of
zero-sum thinking. It's not that we're shrinking our biological memories and
pushing our memories into machines; instead, we're using the internet as
another level of the memory hierarchy, allowing us to work with more
information, faster. Why would using the web make it harder for us to store
information in our biological memory? If anything, it lets us choose to
memorize just the important parts, because we can look up trivial details
easily.

To use a computer analogy, you could think of our short-term memory as CPU
cache, our long-term memory as DRAM, and books as floppy disks. The internet,
then, can be compared to a hard drive: much faster than floppies, with a lot
more capacity per dollar. (I wonder what would correspond to solid state
drives in this analogy. If you can figure out what it is, you can probably
make a lot of money by building it. If Google doesn't beat you to it.)

A meta-criticism I have of this article is that it doesn't talk about actually
measuring the supposed hurtful effects of the internet on creativity. I know
this is a hard thing to measure objectively, but there's got to be _some_ way
to elevate the discussion above the level of bluster-laden hand-waving about
the Scary New Thing. What testable predictions does the article's thesis make?
If anybody has ideas here, I'd love to hear them.

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sarahmccrum
Well I for one would rather read a few comments than such a huge long detailed
page of script. But I have to say that having scanned the whole page and
picked up the key points (I think), it seems to me that the key to the
influence on our brains of the internet, or indeed books or any other source
of information, is the content itself. I once made a series of radio features
for the BBC about children's perceptions of crime. One thing has stayed in my
memory - children talking about the impact of watching the news over
breakfast. They told me that this left them often shaking with nerves because
the focus of the news was so negative - not a good start to the day.

I know that if I start reading lots of bad news when I am feeling really good
it has an instant impact on my mood. Recently when I got temporarily gripped
by the news about the earthquakes in Christchurch I found myself reacting
negatively to completely different things and I couldn't understand why,
because I had been feeling really good. It was only the next day, when I went
back to the news again and the same thing happened, that I figured out what
was going on. This is not because I was worried about the news itself (however
shocking it was) but because it was fundamentally bad news, and we react to
that emotionally usually without even realising it.

It seems to me that it is more important to focus on what kind of material we
spend time on, whether on computers,in books or elsewhere, and consequently
what kind of thoughts and feelings we have during the day, rather than whether
it is computers themselves that are having the effect. Although sitting
looking at a screen all day definitely has an effect on other things like
eyesight, so why not the brain too?

As a little aside Bruce Liptom showed that unborn babies experience all the
mother's emotions, which sets up many of their main emotional patterns in
life. So watch out, mothers-to-be on the internet! You may be affecting your
baby's brain.

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mcarlin
"Yet he doesn’t answer the question that really concerns us: why is it better
to knock information into your head than to get it off the web?"

Because _you_ still have to make the connection between things which
constitutes a thought. How are you going to connect "What that seventeenth
century philosopher Locke said" to "What's been happening in Egypt the last
month" if Google is the one that remembers them both?

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sukuriant
At some level, I wonder if length of this article is also to make a point...
I'm only about halfway through the article.

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asolove
tl;dr; Woody Allen something something

