It depends on how you use the web, and how you define “smarter.”
The internet was abuzz this summer over Nicholas Carr‘s eloquent argument in The Atlantic that the internet is eroding our ability to read long and complex texts (if you agree, but can’t make it through to the end of his 4,200-word essay, chalk it up to confirmation bias).
Now, a new study finds that skilled, thoughtful web surfing can actually build cognitive skills and may delay the onset of dementia in older users.
The findings of the study, by U.C.L.A. memory specialist Gary Small, do not necessarily refute Carr’s argument.
Small’s team found that experienced web users experience increased stimulation in the regions of their brains that handle complex reasoning and decision making. The activity was more widespread than when the same subjects were reading a book, or when inexperienced web users surfed the internet.
In other words, being able to tease out useful information from all the chaff on the internet can be as intellectually demanding a task as completing a crossword puzzle.
But is puzzle solving the same kind of “smartness” as the “smartness” that comes from reading a book?
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They are merely different forms of smartness. And people put more time into developing the kind of smarts that pay off, and in our world day, learning to harness the huge amounts of information on the web is more useful than reading, say, Moby Dick.
I’d love to see what would happen if you repeated the experiment, but substituted “Choose Your Own Adventure” books for the books used in the study. They might be the best way to approximate the behavior of people on the web. They weren’t the best stories, but I remember reading them as a child and running out of fingers to hold the page of my most recent choices.
I love that it’s a short blog that’s talking about eroding our ability to read long and complex texts.
could we compare internet usage to say wikipedia usage? Especially against people whom read all the articles they were referenced to?
It only makes sense that internet use would increase and encourage development of areas of the brain that traditional ‘reading’ wouldn’t. #10′s point that the internet is more like ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ than a regular book is true, but the idea that the internet is like a crossword is even more appropriate. Performing a web search is an analytical activity: we must choose how to define the parameters of the search, we must choose (with limited information) which search result best answers the search inquiry, we must be able to determine whether the link we chose to click is actually what we want to read. This is a lot like reading a crossword clue, trying to figure out the right answer based on the other information we have from the surrounding clues/answers, and then deciding whether the answer we chose is appropriate.
Reading on the internet, though is obviously different than reading in a book (on a book we’re reading light reflected, on a computer we’re reading light projected, so our eyes just don’t react the same way). To talk about reading on the internet being better or worse than reading a book is to miss the point.
Googling brought up UCLA’s news item at and for the joint PR release from UCLA and the publisher, the “American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry,” both of which give study details.
I’m still trying to get my brain around how minimal the study was: there were “24 normal volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76” and “the groups were similar in age, gender and education.” So there were 2 groups of 12 normal volunteers who were between 55 and 76 with half in each group being Internet savvy and the other half not. I guess the study should get credit for finding the volunteers.
The problem is that we aren’t teaching people how to tease out the wheat from the chaff. My generation in particular (I’m 25) is being bombarded with all types of new media, niche media, etc. but media literacy is a subject that’s sorely lacking in our educational system. We teach kids how to use the internet, but we aren’t teaching them how to look critically at what information is being offered and how it is presented, whether it be online, in a news broadcast, or in a magazine. If we want to use the wealth of resources that technology offers to become smarter, we need to start developing those skills.
I started regularly using the internet interactively and on discussion boards 12-13 years ago. Although I am not a web wizard, I am probably in the the upper 10 percent of women talking on the web for as long as I have been.
I used to pride myself on finding answers even before there was a google. Whatever happened to northernlights search? I found so many answers with them. Anyway, it gets tiring and redundant. And yea, so what! you can find answers.
Now I decided to take musical instruments instruction with no book, no reading, just doing as the teacher does. Also, we use sounds and no numbers for counting beats, unless we are totally clueless and he has to resort to that. It is fascinating, and I wonder if book and learn-ed people would get frustrated in such a class and be not so smart wanting numbers and proper instructional methods.