Are We Becoming Cyborgs?

SINCE broadband began its inexorable spread at the start of this millenium, Internet use has expanded at a cosmic rate. Last year, the number of Internet users topped 2.4 billion — more than a third of all humans on the planet. The time spent on the screen was 16 hours per week globally — double that in high-use countries, and much of that on social media. We have changed how we interact. Are we also changing what we are? 

We put that question to three people who have written extensively on the subject, and brought them together to discuss it with Serge Schmemann, the editor of this magazine. The participants: Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Oxford. She has written and spoken widely on the impact of new technology on users’ brains. Maria Popova, the curator behind Brain Pickings, a Web site of “eclectic interestingness.” She is also an M.I.T. Futures of Entertainment Fellow and writes for Wired and The Atlantic. Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom . He is a contributing editor to The New Republic .

Serge Schmemann : The question we are asking is: Are we being turned into cyborgs? Are new digital technologies changing us in a more profound and perhaps troubling way than any previous technological breakthrough?

Let me start with Baroness Greenfield. Susan, you’ve said some very scary things about the impact of the Internet not only on how we think, but on our brains. You have said that new technologies are invasive in a way that the printing press, say, or the electric light or television were not. What is so different?

Susan Greenfield: Can I first qualify this issue of “scary”? What I’m really trying to do is stimulate the debate and try and keep extreme black or white value judgments out of it. Whether people find it scary or not is a separate question. 

The Web by and large is really well designed to help people find more of what they already know they’re looking for, and really poorly designed to help us discover that which we don’t yet know will interest us and hopefully even change the way we understand the world.  

One reason for this is the enormous chronology bias in how the Web is organized. When you think about any content management system or blogging platform, which by the way many mainstream media use as their online presence — be it Wordpress or Tumblr, and even Twitter and Facebook timelines — they’re wired for chronology, so that the latest floats to the top, and we infer that this means that the latest is the most meaningful, most relevant, most significant. The older things that could be timeless and timely get buried.  

So a lot of what I do is to try to resurface these old things. Actually, in thinking about our conversation today, I came across a beautiful 1945 essay that was published in The Atlantic by a man named Vannevar Bush, who was the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He talks about information overload and all these issues that, by the way, are not at all unique to our time. He envisions a device called the Memex, from “memory” and “index”; he talks about the compression of knowledge, how all of Encyclopedia Britannica can be put in the Memex, and we would use what we would now call metadata and hyperlinks to retrieve different bits of information.

His point is that at the end of the day, all of these associative relations between different pieces of information, how they link to one another, are really in the mind of the user of the Memex, and can never be automated. While we can compress the information, that’s not enough, because you need to be able to consult it.

That’s something I think about a lot, this tendency to conflate information and knowledge. Ultimately, knowledge is an understanding of how different bits of information fit together. There’s an element of correlation and interpretation. While we can automate the retrieving of knowledge, I don’t think we can ever automate the moral end on making sense of that and making sense of ourselves.

Schmemann : Evgeny, in your book, you paint a fairly ominous picture of the Internet as something almost of a Brave New World — a breeding ground, you say, not of activists, but slacktivists — people who think that clicking on a Facebook petition, for example, counts as a political act.

Do you think that technology has taken a dangerous turn?

Evgeny Morozov : I don’t think that any of the trends I’ve been writing about are the product of some inherent logic of technology, of the Internet itself. To a large extent they are the product of a political economy and various market conditions that these platforms operate in.

It just happens that sites like Facebook do want to have you clicking on new headlines and new photos and new news from your friends, in part because the more you click the more they get to learn about you; and the more they get to learn about you the better advertising they can sell.

In that sense, the Internet could be arranged very differently. It doesn’t have to be arranged this way. The combination of public/private funding and platforms we have at the moment makes it more likely that we’ll be clicking rather than, say, reading or getting deeper within one particular link.

As for the political aspect, I didn’t mean to paint a picture that is so dark. As a platform, as a combination of various technologies, the Internet does hold huge promise. Even Facebook can be used by activists for smart and strategic action. 

The question is whether it will displace other forms of activism, and whether people will think they’re campaigning for something very important when they are in fact joining online groups that have very little relevance in the political world — and which their governments are actually very happy with. Many authoritarian governments I document in the book are perfectly O.K. with young people expressing discontent online, so long as it doesn’t spill out into the streets.