So the U.S. Secret Service continues to investigate the teenage author of the Obama assassination poll on Facebook.
Are you in favor of this investigation?
a. Yes
b. No
c. Maybe
d. Yes, if it cuts my healthcare
Seriously, however, I wonder if the Secret Service needs to look more broadly at this bizarre poll about whether Facebook users think it appropriate to assassinate the democratically elected president of the United States of America.
Perhaps the real investigation should be of the 731 people who actually responded to the poll before it got pulled down by the Facebook authorities.
Maybe the Secret Service should investigate the Internet and its impact on our mental distinction between fantasy and reality.
What needs to be investigated is what exactly were those 731 Facebook users thinking when they saw that poll with the question, “Should Obama be killed?” What, exactly, were they thinking when they physically responded by actually clicking one of the buttons to that mindless poll?
Maybe the real investigation should be into what damage the Internet is doing to the thinking neighborhood of our brains.
According to Susan Greenfield, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University and director of The Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Internet is indeed changing the cognitive parts of our brains.
In a recent BBC speech to mark the 20th anniversary of the Internet, Greenfield argued that the major impact of contemporary digital technology on our brains is to prioritize the “sensory” over the “cognitive.”
It’s the difference, Greenfield explained, between what she calls “screen culture” and reading a book. The short attention span of the Internet prioritizes the here and now of the immediate sensory experience, what she calls “the yuk and wow” of shallow, all-action video games and endlessly interactive online exchanges. It’s the immediate thrill of pressing the button and living for the moment, rather than sitting back contemplatively and slowly turning the many pages of a book.
What Greenfield is arguing is that screen culture so overwhelms the calming, contemplative side of the brain that it replaces deep thinking with the thoughtlessness of immediate action. The world all around us becomes such a noisy, colorful, and, of course, superficial fantasy that we actually lose touch with the densely complex, multi-layered reality of the physical world.
And it’s this loss of reality which, I suspect, explains why 731 presumably sane and law-abiding Facebook users responded to the Obama assassination poll.
On the Internet, particularly on immersive social networks like Facebook in which we interact with our thousands of “friends,” reality has become so fantastic that our senses have indeed entirely overwhelmed our cognition.
You can’t just blame all this on the Internet, of course. As Neil Postman argued so persuasively in his classic 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, television did the same corrosive harm to our brains. Video games and interactive Internet polls are really just more speeded-up versions of screen culture -- TV 2.0, if you like.
But what becomes of our culture when everything is seen as a video game? What becomes of our values when almost a thousand people respond to a poll about killing the U.S. president?
In 1985, Postman argued that screen culture was amusing ourselves to death. In 2007, I wrote a book that argued that the Internet was killing our culture. Both books, however, used the idea of death and killing as a metaphor for a deeper cultural malaise.
What the immediacy and shallowness of screen culture kills more than anything else, however, is metaphor. There’s a dark irony to this -- particularly when contemplated in the context of the Obama assassination poll.
Yes, you and I know that online death, death in a video, isn’t real death. But tragically, the distinction between fantasy and reality is becoming so flattened and blurred that, for many youngsters on the Internet, fantasy has become reality.
— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, can be reached on Twitter at @ajkeen.
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Email This
TWEET THIS
