Is the Internet making us smarter?

Following on from John's post, linking to the original Guardian story, about a researcher concerned that the Internet may be making us dumber.

The original article (not John's reply) falls into two cliches of academic research in psychology. The first cliche being that new technology is making us stupider. It was said of video games, it was said of television, it was said of radio, it was said of newspapers, it was said of books.  Every new technology has been denounced in these terms. It appears that at least some of these predictions have been wrong.

Here I must admit a personal bias, as I was an early contributor to the design of the World Wide Web. This is my work that Dr Wolf is treading on. So guage my rebuttal accordingly.

The other, more insidious cliche is that of the researcher who discovers that their subjects have different intelligence, and assumes that this must mean inferior. Thus if the Internet is changing people's brains, it can only be for the worst since the investigator already has the best of all possible brains.

If you haven't read it, Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is the definitive smackdown of this mode of research. Gould describes the history of IQ tests, from their original invention as a means of measuring the progress of mentally retarded patients, to their miscomprehension as a measure of intellectual capability.

One of the claims made for IQ tests is that they are a measure of innate intelligence, and that "practice" does not affect the results. I know from my own experience that this is wrong. As a pupil at a selective junior school, we were required to take practice tests every week to prepare us for the senior school examination. Since we had already passed the junior school entrance examination, our IQ scores were already well above average, yet all of our scores rose over the year. By the middle of the year I was consistently scoring 100%, and so were others.

The brain is plastic and if you train it to do a particular task, particularly at a young age, it will adapt to that task and get better. The Soduku craze is almost certainly changing people's brains. But nobody seems to worry much about the pernicious threat from Soduku.

Dr Wolf's hypothesis might have validity if all that people did on the Internet was read. But even then, is the fact that youth culture is now a litterary culture such a bad thing? Twenty years ago, reading was considered an unconditional good. But children don't just read on the Internet, they play games as well as read, and the better, more popular games are the ones that have some intellectual depth. Crazy birds has a fairly sophisticated two dimensional physics engine built into it, simulating the effect of each missile. Civilization is grounded in history and technology. Tomb Raider presents the player with sophisiticated logic puzzles.

Dr Wolf's claim, that children are reading faster because they are not reading analytically, seems questionable to me. Children may not be reading analytically in the lab because they have already established the necessary analytical framework to comprehend the text before they stepped inside.

Of course, the newspaper op-ed is itself an imperfect medium, and it is entirely possible that what people are going to read into Dr Wolf's article (Internet = bad) is not what she intends. She appears rather more reasonable in an extended interview.

As society places a greater priority on reading, the reported incidence of reading disorders is going to increase. Twenty years ago, the teen with reading difficulty was easily overlooked as 'slow' or 'stupid.' Today even the slow and stupid kids are texting away on their mobiles, and the teen who isn't reading or writing is far more conspicuous.

So in counter-point to Dr Wolf, is anyone examining the contrary hypothesis? Is the Internet making kids smarter, as they start reading at an earlier age and become adept at synthesizing and managing large volumes of facts and information? The Internet is undoubtedly making kids different, but is it making them smarter or dumber? It can well be both, as intelligence is not a linear variable -- there are different types of intelligence.

In the sci-fi show Babylon 5, one of the plot threads involves the Psi-corps, a government agency of telepaths. Socially isolated, the telepaths look down on non-telepaths as 'mundanes.' I am pretty sure that the Internet is not turning kids into telepaths.  But if adults leap to the conclusion that 'different' must mean 'inferior,' they may well find that they are the ones being looked down on as mundane.