Does the internet make you smarter or not?

“Why the Internet Is Making Us Smarter” published by Nick morgan

Lots of commentators have bemoaned the rise of the Internet, and before that television, arguing that these evil distractions have shortened our attention spans and caused us to become digital idiots, capable of only the briefest moments of focus. 

But all of this handwringing is missing the real point.  It’s not that we’re becoming dumber, it’s rather that the object of our focus has changed.  In one way, we’re actually getting smarter – much, much smarter. 

Society – work, entertainment, and the arts – have been shifting from print to visual at a rapidly accelerating rate over the past half-century years.  In the past decade, with the rise of broadband and the Internet, the shift has moved into high gear

We’re only just beginning to learn how to create, present, and absorb information in visual terms.  We’re like the first producers and readers of books as they became mass-producible.

 

Now we’re in the same early stages of the visual information explosion.  YouTube is primitive, but powerful.  Our ability to absorb visual information is accelerating rapidly.  If you compare video – and movies – of the last few years with a movie from the 1940s, the difference in visual density and pacing is astonishing.

We’re learning a new language and a new medium.  We can now handle visual shortcuts and codes that would have baffled us even 20 years ago.

“The Internet makes you think you’re smarter than you really are” published by Isha Aran

As anyone who’s ever consulted their phone to look up the name of the actor who played that kid in that 80s sitcom? Having easy access to the Internet can make us humans feel supernaturally smart—but cut off our connection, and alas, we return to our mortal mental state.

“The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world’s knowledge at your fingertips,” said Matthew Fisher, lead researcher on the study, in a statement. The study appears in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology.

“It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source,” he said. “When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet.”

•

Researchers gave one group of participants a specific URL to research a question (“Why are there dimples on a golf ball?”). The other group did not have Internet access, but the researchers provided them with the same exact explanation as the first group found online. Sure enough, the Internet researchers were more confident in their ability to answer the question.

In another, especially striking experiment, participants who had access to the Internet actually thought their brains were more active. When presented with a series of functional MRI scans and asked to choose which represented their brain activity, they chose the more active images.

In another experiment, both the Internet research group and the non-Internet group were given a series of autobiographical questions such as “Why are you so close with your best friend?” They were then asked to rate how well they could explain their answers. Turns out, even with so much information at their fingertips, the Internet access group wasn’t any more confident in their relationship smarts than the non-Internet folks.

Moral of the story: Internet access doesn’t make you personally smarter, so don’t go thinking you’re Lex Luthor (in an intellectual sense) just because you have WiFi. 

Retrieved from:http://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorgan/2012/11/28/why-the-internet-is-making-us-smarter-in-one-way/#2fd21baf45b0

http://fusion.net/story/112328/study-the-internet-makes-you-think-youre-smarter-than-you-really-are/