Robert Frost with students at Dartmouth, 1947.
We are.
Still, a growing chorus of cranks continue to trot out the digital age’s most resilient trope–that the Internet is making us stupid. (Your mere awareness of these words is putting your intelligence at risk).
These warnings comes from Nobel Prize winners, sitting U.S. Presidents, well-meaning wonks and the person who is currently the Nation’s Most Important Novelist, who in February told the Guardian newspaper that, “It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”
Conveniently, most of these gripes are uttered in broad terms, rarely bothering to offer proof, or even define the term “Internet,” the troublesome lifeblood of every digital activity. Presumably they are all equally bad for our intellectual health, our attention spans and our ability to care about books nobody has read for seventy five years.
Never mind that at no other time in history has more knowledge been more accessible to more citizens of the planet or that stupidity has been a major part of humanity since humans first crawled from the muck, which preceded the arrival of the Internet by 200,000 years.
The web has won. The Internets are everywhere, like air and Lady Gaga. In 1995 there were 6 million people using the Internet worldwide. Today that number is closer to 1.2 billion. Ruminating on the dangers the Web poses pointless, akin t0 somebody in 1915 suggesting that electricity was a threat because it was going to make people less appreciative of candle light. (Douglas Adams anticipated all this back in 1999).
Yes, there are broad swaths of the Internet that are utter crap (this is equally true of analog mediums, of course). Yes, the Internet does allows those who do stupid things to broadcast them widely. And, yes, all of this diddling around online is probably altering our brains, though the same is true of walking down the street and praying.
What is goading about the proclamations routinely made by the guardians of high culture is that they continue to place the blame on the wrong party
If we are more stupid today it is not the Internet’s fault. It’s ours. We are the ones acting of our own free will to use this IQ-sapping technology to make our lives more convenient, more informed and more full of momentary diversions.
The Internet is passive. It doesn’t force us to learn French or watch double rainbow videos. It just sits there, running its protocols, waiting, idle. We make a choice to indulge, the same way we do with booze, cheeseburgers, and power tools.
In other words, don’t blame the game, blame the players.
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