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Do any of us honestly believe that our powers of concentration are enhanced by multitasking? Of course not. The question is, what are we gaining by having all this near-instantaneous access to information, and does it in some sense outweigh what we give up in sustained concentration?
Not only that, but the internet gives us the ability to interact—at virtually no cost, and across vast distances—with other individuals; and of course it gives us the ability to participate, ourselves, in discourse. This social, interactive dimension of the internet can't be dismissed as just another source of distraction. It's the ability to collaborate in real time, to compare, to debate. That kind of connection and combination--that's a rich primordial soup out of which emergent phenomena are apt to arise.
Many have argued that what we've arguably surrendered in depth we've more than made up for in increased breadth—that we've had a net gain in total volume, in depth times breadth.
I'm more interested in another kind of breadth—the expansion of information horizons the internet has brought to a much, much greater portion of humanity. There's been, in short, a kind of democratization of intelligence.
When you hear people say that "the internet is making us stupid," you need to ask yourself who this "us" they're talking about actually is. If you think about it, in most cases it's implicitly being defined in a very elitist way: Is "us" just a privileged intelligentsia that enjoyed the luxury of uninterrupted hours of reading with concentration? I say let us use a more inclusive "us."
One that includes the hundreds of millions in lower-tier cities and in rural areas of China, for instance, who've begun using the internet just in the last five years: tell them that the internet's making "us" stupid. So a generation of privileged Americans and Brits find they can no longer power through chapter after chapter of Tolstoy or Proust. If a much larger generation of long impoverished people across the developing world are seeing their information horizons immeasurably broadened in the bargain, I call that an excellent deal.
Not only is the "us" too narrowly defined, but so is the intelligence that my opponents claim is being sucked out of us by the evil internet. Sure, I'd admire anyone with the pure power of concentration to allow him or her to digest at one sitting several hundreds of pages of Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason. But is that the only type of intelligence worthy of the name?
You see, we're being asked to lament the decline of what is in fact a too-narrowly defined idea of intelligence. Should we prize the ability to concentrate and to read deeply? Absolutely. Should we privilege that type of intelligence over other types? I can't see why we should.
excellent challenge to west-centric pov
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