Before I go any further, I want to make one thing clear: I am not one of those hipsters who wants to go back to the simpler times where we all used typewriters, nor am I a raving lunatic who thinks technology is the devil’s work. I just think there might be a lot of negative consequences of the internet that many people have not considered.
There are definitely a lot of advantages to using the internet. The World Wide Web has changed the world most profoundly, greatly increasing our ability to communicate. From iMessage to email to social media, it has allowed us to interact with people we would not normally have the opportunity of interacting with, at nearly all hours of every day — it has created a living, breathing community that can be tapped into.
The internet has also exponentially increased the amount of information we have. It is a place that everyone can compile all of the research humanity has ever done — scientific, historical and otherwise.
But there are definitely some drawbacks we’re not looking at hard enough.
You have almost definitely heard someone say, “You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.” Although this is often said as a joke, it is true, and it has bigger implications than we might think. Before, anything that was written down had to go through a publisher or be self-published in order to affect the public; now, anyone can put anything on the internet for millions of people to read.
This is good for many reasons. For starters, it limits censorship — which used to actually be a huge problem in journalism and literature — and allows anyone to get their ideas out there. But, the internet also allows people to publish things that aren’t true, and readers are often not the best about checking their sources.
The problem isn’t so much that blatantly false things are written on the internet (although sometimes they are) — the real problem is more subtle and insidious than that. People publish things that are kind of true, a little bit exaggerated and very emotionally charged. Something can be posted on Twitter and receive millions of retweets — and regardless of how accurate it is — people will believe it.
The internet, and more importantly, the internet on our smartphones, is addicting. Addiction, at least from our rudimentary psychological knowledge of it, comes from our brains associating certain stimuli in our environment with a dopamine release in the brain. Whenever we get a notification from either social media or texts, our brains release a little bit of dopamine. Just like how Pavlov used classical conditioning to get dogs to drool at the sound of a bell, our brains are coming to associate every buzz or vibration from our phones with pleasure release. Our constant access to the internet is literally reprogramming our brains.
The biggest and most damaging aspect of this is perhaps that the internet is also changing the way we read. Information overload is real, and the internet is not just full of vital and riveting information, but also completely useless and dumb information and memes. One way our brains have adapted to this is by changing the way we absorb information. You don’t read a Wikipedia page the same way you read a book: that would be completely useless and unhelpful. Instead, our brains scan the page looking for key information, and more importantly, links!
Links, ads, pop-ups — our eyes are looking for literally anything clickable. The internet is inherently distracting, not because anyone intended it to be so, but because it has evolved that way naturally. The more pages a user visits, the more money a company makes from ads, so naturally, the sites that are successful are the ones that are distracting. Every time you click, it gives the website owner a little more money.
I would also argue that because we have the internet, we actually know less. Sure, you can look up the artist of particular song in ten seconds and find out both where and when it was recorded. But many complicated concepts require pages or even books worth of background knowledge to truly understand. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the phenomenon when someone who is new to a field thinks they know more than they actually do, because they are ignorant of what they don’t know. I think it might be applicable here.
There is literally no way to get rid of the internet. It’s here to stay, and I don’t think we would be better off without it. But perhaps we need to reimagine the etiquette of using the internet so as to not destroy our brains or the brains of future generations. Should children have an addicting device in their pocket? Should we view using a phone while walking, driving or simply spending time with friends as normally as we do now? Perhaps not.
Many great things can also be bad. Prescription painkillers have helped so many people, yet they have also caused a great deal of harm in the form of overdoses, by people who did not realize how addicting these drugs would be. Perhaps we should view the internet — something that has huge and long-term psychological repercussions, something that is addicting — in a similar way.
