Are You Smarter than A 19th Century Academic?

It seems to be a consensus among the late Boomers and early Gen-Xers that the internet has caused a sharp decline in our (the Gen-Yers') intellectual prowess. I was listening to this program on NPR, where Brooke Gladstone interviewed Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which is a 'fact tank' that studies the way the internet has impacted, and will continue to impact our lives.

When faced with the question, "Is the internet making us stupid?" he cited Nicolas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" article, and Carr's claim that the breadth and accessibly of the information that 'wired' people have is causing us to become surface thinkers. We can gather and retain, but can we analyze? When was the last time you carefully and thoughtfully read a book for an extended period of time? Is his basic question...

What Rainie argues, is that the internet is making us 'information omnivores,' and we can digest and process more than one type of information. He cited a survey that Pew Internet had done of the 2004 election...the search results that came in were very surprising to me and to Brooke Gladstone, because of its incredibly optimistic implications. Rainie said that the people that they interviewed who were very firm in their political beliefs and that were 'wired' generally tended to have a broader scope of political arguments to base their opinions on. To me, this presents a wonderfully hopeful (not eutopian, but rather nicely un-doomsdayish) idea, that people who are more hungry for information, and more eager to form solid world and social views can do it in a way that is more encompassing and more powerful, and helps them escape the 'echo-chamber' that older intellectualism tended to place upon them. I think the next question we need to ask ourselves is what this means for the reluctant learners, people who are not necessarily 'stupid,' but who are less hungry for information.

Haven't there always been people who are less hungry for information? I think (and Rainie would most likely agree...) that there will always be people like that, who don't want to learn, and who can't find a way to enter into the information, regardless of how accessible it is. So, my answer to the question of the nature of intellectualism in a digital age, is that it is, on a base level, the same as intellectualism has always been...but now the tools we need to foster our intellect are more readily available. To me, intellectualism is about wanting to learn, and having a need to know as many things as you can, and to understand them. Doesn't that still exist? And now that we do have such wide and immediate access to information, isn't there less of an excuse to not be 'an intellectual?'

We talked in class about Cathedrals and Pancakes, the former being the ideal of the classic intellectual, whose foundation is solid and intricate, but also unmoving. The latter is our intellect in this age of the internet; widely spread, thin and flimsy. But in a world of intense and unstoppable change, wouldn't you rather have an intellect that can bend and continue to spread, than something that attempts to thwart time and nature? Because we all know what happens when finally those to things win (and they always win...)...the structure comes crashing down, people die and these precious, treasured objects are lost forever.

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