Is the internet affecting our intelligence? Yes, but in a good way.

The idea that the internet is somehow making our generation less intelligent is hogwash. As represented in Dennis Baron’s book, A Better Pencil, this idea is just a representation of a repeated theme throughout history that simply exhibits that some people just do not like change and are going to recoil from ingenuity. In his book Baron discuses different times in history when the exact same scenario arrises, as the one that has arisen with the internet. My favorite example that he gives is one of Plato. Plato basically does not like the idea of writing. He felt that if people were to write things down, versus speaking them out face to face, then humans would loose the ability to store their knowledge in their heads. And to some extent Plato was right. Today we do write things down, and therefore do not rely as heavily upon our memory as people used to. But the ultimate irony of this story is that for any of us to know Plato’s thoughts today, he had to write all of them down. So basically he wrote a critique about the act of writing. And what Baron is saying is that the same sort of situation applies to the internet. The internet is not making mankind any dumber, rather just changing the way we might think, and reapplying those thoughts through a different medium. In his book, Baron discusses and analyzes a number of different critiques made upon the internet. For instance, how the internet allegedly will “depersonalize the relationships between people” , “remove people from the living world, so they only exist in the digital world”, or that “the digital revolution is making us worse writers”.

These claims are absurd. Now, I am not saying that we should totally rule out and dismiss these ideas, but I think these people that are saying these things are going to an extreme end of the spectrum. I would not be against using some measures to try and prevent these things from happening, but to say that these claims have already come to fruition is crazy. In fact, on that last claim, I can honestly say that I believe the complete opposite of what it stated. I think that the use of the internet and social networking sites has made us, as a generation and as a people, better writers. How could we not become more skilled at writing if we are constantly practicing it over and over again, day in and day out? It’s their statistics which claim that we use the internet and consume too much. But when we are contributing, we are writing out our thoughts and ideas; even if the subject matter is trivial, we are still writing nonetheless. And when we are consuming, are we not just absorbing information though an alternate format? Those who believe that we are not learning and developing are just blind to the fact that we are learning and developing in a different way.

- Cullen Lawlor