Podcast transcripts: 🔊Is the Internet changing the way we think?

Is the Internet changing th way we think?

This podcast is part of the UCIL Digital Society course from the University of Manchester. The story it relates to is hosted on Medium and can be found here.

In this podcast Carlene and Dave discuss the topic ‘Is the Internet changing the way we think?’

Chapter 1 transcript

Carlene: Hi, I’m Carlene, and I’m the curator for this week’s content on “the internet”.

Dave: And hi, my name is Dave. I’m a course convener for the digital society unit.

Carlene: In this podcast, we’ll be talking about our plastic brains and how the internet is affecting them. We’ll be talking about cognitive offloading, attention monetization, surface and deep learning.

Cognitive offloading is an action that we all do and have done as a species since we learned how to write and store images and information on cave walls, stone tablets, papyrus, scrolls, and lately on laptops and smartphones. It hasn’t been a new activity for quite a long time and we’ve got pretty good at offloading information outside our own physical structures.

What is slightly different in more recent times is how we’re using technologies such as laptops, smartphones, and the internet, and the effect that this cognitive offloading onto our digital tools is having on our ability to read linearly and absorb ourselves in complex deep learning. This could potentially be affecting our emotional depth and compassion, by limiting ourselves to short bursts of activity and reducing our urgency and ability to solve problems.

Dave: So from my own perspective, I’ve been finding issues immersing myself in books and movies which I used to love and enjoy spending time on. And I feel that this issue’s got steadily more present over the last five years or so.

So anything where I have to spend a significant time focused on a single action, so watching a movie, reading a book, I tend to struggle with. Mainly my thoughts keep turning back to the internet, or Instagram, or email, or searching. So in essence, I’ve been kind of trained, or I’ve trained myself towards a state of permanent stimulation, which stops me enjoying things I used to, so I find it a bit frustrating. What do you think, Carlene?

Carlene: Well, I grew up with the internet. It’s always been there. I had the internet on my phone in the days of the wireless access protocol, so pre smartphones. Um, so I’ve just always been online. Before social media and, like, MySpace really took off, my friends and I used to use a site called uboot, which was from, like, ’99, and it was essentially like MySpace, which came out later on in 2004, but was really popular in, sort of, European countries like Germany and Switzerland. So most other teenagers weren’t really on social media, weren’t aware of UBoot, It was kind of this little space in the UK. So we realized we could save a lot of money really, because this is when you used to pay per text. So instead of buying credit, we used to go on uboot and communicate.

That said, I’ve noticed a difference in how I manage my digital wellbeing since the 2020 pandemic. That year we switched to learning and working mostly online. Different technologies helped us keep in touch despite restrictions in terms of like going outside and going to work.

However, since we started to return to work, we still use some of those instant messaging approaches, whilst also being present in person. I think this is why I struggle to focus on things like I used to. I make myself always available online all times, and I think this is something that I really need to work on, to be honest.

Dave: So following on from my cognitive offloading, I think the big question here is, is about, is around like, are we being trained or are we training ourselves? So, you know, looking back at my comment about whether we’re being trained or training ourselves with the technology, current research confirms that being trained in this way by software and devices can then cause us to lose our long-term ability to focus, which can then impact on our ability to take an in depth look at topics, the news and literature, which then comes back to the subtitle of this podcast: “Is the Internet Shaping the Way We Think?” And if the internet is shaping us, what is the agenda? And then this goes back to like, big corporations: what do they want by this, and what is the end result?

Well, nothing is for free, is it? So if we think it’s free, it isn’t. And we can even go back to, like, the first topic week, “Digital Engagement”, here and paraphrase that great quote, which has been around for a while and is still relevant: if you’re receiving something for free, then you are the product. It’s never really free, so think about that in terms of, like, Facebook.

It’s not all negative, though, and I don’t want to focus this podcast on an entirely negative approach. So there are positives. We have access to all this information that was previously unavailable or inaccessible for a wide range of reasons. You know, at this point in history, we have access to more information than ever before. And it’s increasing on a second-by-second basis. You can easily see how much information has been created across different platforms in the “Internet of Things” week. And I think that one of the key questions that we need to face, as like a species, is how we manage this information.

So when I think about this question, from my perspective about, are we being trained by software and big tech, or are we kind of training ourselves? I think it’s potentially a bit of a mixture. The end point is the companies want to sell us something, whether it’s an app or a physical product, and the way to do this is to capture and monetize our attention spans. The tools and applications that we use are very useful at doing this. So can we get round this issue? Can we kind of, you know, untrain ourselves, I suppose? Can we raise our awareness around how we’re being manipulated? Do we want to change our well-established behaviour patterns, or even can we?

Carlene: From my perspective, there’s both positives and negatives. And one example I often think about is our digital bubbles. So your digital bubble is essentially all those people you follow on social media, the topics you discuss online, adverts you watch, sites you visit, because you agree with those people or like those products. Like with friends in the real world, we surround ourselves with things that interest us and usually people we like.

When we do this though, we often get our own thoughts reflected back at us and our opinions reinforced. And that’s not great. To really understand an argument, you need to understand the other ideas and experiences and perspectives. I was definitely guilty of this when I engaged more with social media.

However, on a positive side, I’m more of an online gamer, social ones in particular, and in that space I’ve engaged with and made real friendships with people I might not have in real life. People with very different political opinions and views on life. And I’ve learned a lot. And thought more deeply about many things because of it.

So sometimes it might take a specific effort, but you can choose how the internet shapes you by what you engage with on it. Think critically, certainly on social media, and make it a place for great debate and growth.

Chapter 2

Dave: So in this section, this kind of second section, we’re going to talk about the internet and how we retain information. So we have all this information, you know, it’s potentially too much for us, and what do we do with it? If you think about how we normally acquire knowledge, you’d have to look at our short-term memory and how we transfer information from our short term to long term memory.

From the neuroscientist’s perspective, the understanding used to be that we could hold about nine to ten bits of information in our working memory. But the consensus now is that it is more likely to be three or four things and potentially less in our short-term memory at any one time. With how the internet works and the quantity of information, links, software applications, it doesn’t really take very much to overload the capacity of our short-term memory.

We don’t have to look very far either to find a significant body of research which suggests the issues with information overload could be part of our DNA. We just want to know stuff, and it’s an essential element of our nature as a human being, a kind of primal driver. But the internet is breaking the link which transfers information from our working memory to our long-term memory and the connections between information in our plastic brains.

This can then have a knock-on effect, limiting our criticality, and also our creativity. As a species, we are not particularly adept at thinking about a lot of information all the time. And this can then mean we’re in a state of shallow learning and shallow thinking, missing out on deeper learning completely.

So from my perspective, and, you know, how I see this, I feel a bit like my brain is bobbing about or drifting in a sea of information that’s in a constant state of flux. I can find the answer to any question, but is it the right answer, or even am I asking the right question? With the technology and the apps, there is something constantly grabbing my attention, even if quite a lot of the time I don’t really gain anything from it.

Carlene: So from my perspective, technology, the internet, software and hardware are essentially often trying to make our lives easier by saving us time and effort. However, I think it being so easy to access information means we’re often not building that experience of researching, discussing, and forming our thoughts and critical thinking by taking more time.

Because it’s instant, we sort of feel a pressure to have and know things instantly. This also means we’re less likely to think deeply on it, or even remember it later. We’re more likely to adopt what we read as fact. Also, why remember it when you can just search for it again? I also wonder if generative AI is only adding to this. When it’s used in certain ways, it can be great in helping us be more productive by, for example, translating things. But if we’re using it to do something rather than learn how to do it, we can de skill ourselves.

If the internet disappeared tomorrow, how would we cope? What services would be affected, for example? How would I learn to fix something in my house without an enthusiastic DIYer on YouTube? I think it’s important we never become too reliant on technology but use it as a part of our toolkit and think about how and why we’re using it.

Dave: I really like this quote, we’re training ourselves to be fast paced process of information, but then that kind of thinking about that quote, it really potentially limits our ability to pay attention to one thing. With all these different streams of information coming into our brains from all these different sources.

Something that you can think about here is the research is still ongoing about how our brains are coping with the internet. There are lots of different viewpoints on there and you can see that, for example, research used to support the idea that our brains were malleable up until our 20sl, but now, this kind of neuroplasticity is seen as a function that lasts our entire lives. And it’s not just restricted to our early years. So maybe we can reconfigure our plastic brains to deal with this situation in a better way.

Carlene: But the internet is very good at training us to be masters of distraction. We’re moulding our brains for a very specific type of thinking, which is fundamentally changing the way we think and the ability we have, or have had, around deep learning.

What do you think? Does this sound familiar? I’m assuming here that everyone listening to this is on the UCIL Digital Society unit and has grown up with the internet. For you, it’s never not been there. Do you recognise what we’re talking about? Or is this just the way it is? Just life? Can we bring it back as well, that deeper state of learning?

If you never had a learning experience without the internet, then you won’t necessarily know that you’re missing anything. Is it harder to work towards something that you’ve never had? Let’s face it, it’s hard but not impossible to change our habits as they tap into our instincts. We want to know, we want to socially connect with people, check our status.

For most of us, it’s really hard to change our habits even if we know it’s not healthy in terms of how we are learning and retaining information. It’s the compulsive need to check the device, the technology, all the time.

Dave: Even now, both myself and Carlene are sat in a recording studio recording this, I am conscious I haven’t looked at my phone for a while, haven’t checked if I’ve had a message, haven’t checked Teams, you know, has anyone liked that picture I put on Instagram?

Carlene: Yes, this is true for me too, I take my phone everywhere to make a brew or anything, as if I get a second, I check it and there’s usually something on there to read or reply to.

Dave: So fundamentally I think it comes down to, you know, our evolutionary drive to know information mixed with the corporations’ financial incentive to monetize our attention span, to distract our attention, to keep our attention to make money from the constant stream of adverts.

I am going to put a however in here because it’s not all about the internet being the big bad. It’s important for us to not lose sight of the fact that we can evolve. and change our behaviour patterns. What can we do to spot bias in the information that we get? How can we improve as critical thinkers? And also share that practice with, you know, our friends and family.

Just to kind of conclude from my perspective, there are lots of strategies out there that can help to retune our brains and develop a healthier balance with technology, and I’m optimistic that it’s entirely possible.

Carlene: Yes, if you want to learn more, take a look at our library guide, Start to Finish Digital Capabilities.

It will show you how to access and complete a reflection on your capabilities, including your digital wellbeing, providing you with some tools and strategies to help you not only survive, but thrive in today’s digital society.

Dave: Thank you for listening.