Internet making us dumber
In 1993, CNN aired one of its first reports about a promising new technology called “Internet.” The story, which is aptly now available online, brims with optimism about how much smarter this new connection of computers will make humanity, as it promises to “allow the high-tech flow of facts and figures between government, business, schools and citizens.”
“One of its greatest achievements seems to be as an aid in scientific research,” the report continues. “By tapping into Internet, scientists can share knowledge with another scientist at lightning speed.”
At the time, Internet enthusiasm had even reached the White House. According to the CNN report, just days before, Vice President Al Gore said he could “foresee the day when a youngster just home from school, given a choice between Nintendo and the Encyclopedia Britannica, would choose to access the encyclopedia.”
One can’t blame Gore for being bullish on the prospects of such information being available with a couple of strokes of the keyboard. Without the Internet, this column you’re reading right now wouldn’t be possible. And the scientific progress made in the era of the World Wide Web has been undeniable.
But rather than making the average American smarter, the Internet has instead allowed us to retreat back to our most base impulses. Whereas it once promised a high-minded world of boundless knowledge, interconnectivity has instead reinforced our flaws. We are now primarily roving packs of like-minded ideologues hell-bent on eviscerating dissent and demonstrating primacy within our own groups. (Who, when taking breaks, watch a lot of Netflix and porn.)
There is no more notable example of this than our incoming president, who has eliminated the phrase “I wonder what Donald Trump thinks of this issue” from our public nomenclature.
But Trump’s reflexive musings also frequently attack others in the style of an anonymous troll. Opponents are “dishonest,” “stiffs,” “clowns,” “overrated” or whatever happens to be careening through his cranium at the time. In doing so, the most powerful man in the world feeds the cultural decline only he thinks he can revive.
It didn’t have to be this way. In an early Canadian news report, playwright and “Internet enthusiast” John Allen tells a reporter being online “feels a bit like every day human fellowship.”
“There’s an interesting kind of restraint that you find,” Allen tells the CBC. “There’s not a lot of cursing or swearing, there’s not a lot of personal cuts, there’s not a lot of put-downs that one would expect to find. There’s not screens full of ‘go to hell.’ ”
“One would think if you’re anonymous, you’d do anything you want.” But groups “have their own sense of community and what they can do.”
But now that the Internet has grown, these groups have turned against one another, with often vulgar and tasteless results. Even within groups, Internet users are vilified for not being sufficiently wed to the cause; now whenever a celebrity dies, it is important to demonstrate how much deeper your appreciation of, say, Carrie Fisher, was than everyone else’s.
According to the 1993 CNN report, Internet “critics” were afraid the web “could turn out to be an elitist system, one available only to people with a computer and a modem.” But the problem isn’t that we have become too “elite,” it’s that we’ve become too comfortable behaving like our actual selves.