Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

2.16.11 | If you read anything this week it should be Adam Gopnik’s survey of a year’s worth of books about how the internet may be changing all of us.

In an article that social media guru Howard Rheingold called an “essential synthesis” of the debates over how the internet changes our thinking. Gopnik does what he does best: surveys a complex set of ideas—in this case the internet, the self and society—and frames how they relate in a way that makes us reflect more deeply and broadly than we did before.

In “The Information: How the Internet gets Inside Us,” published in this week’s New Yorker, Gopnik covers many of the books and authors we’ve written about on Spotlight – from Clay Shirky and Nick Carr to, most recently, Sherry Turkle—all the while quipping about the paradox of an ever-expanding “series of books explaining why books no longer matter.”

But his framework is really helpful here. The books, writes Gopnik, come in a variety of genres: “The Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers:”

The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.

Gopnik takes readers on a journey, taking apart each argument as he goes. If we’re going to give machines credit for good in the world—the printing press for the Reformation for example—we have to credit it for the religious warfare and repression that followed as well. Same will go for the internet revolution.

“The Internet may make for more freedom a hundred years from now,” he writes, “but there’s no historical law that says it has to.”

There are both good things and bad things about “living in the library.” Crowdsourcing is powerful, but murky misinformation will always leak through, and we all need to retain some skepticism.

We feel peaceful when we close our laptops and turn off the internet, not because we need a break from our inboxes, Gopnik posits, but because we need a break from our “inverted selves,” reflecting back to us from our online profiles.

His measured analysis of these arguments is somehow calming for those of us who stay up nights thinking about the power and perils of the digital world. The internet revolution is part of our history and humanity, and it will change us, but not irrevocably.

“The real gains and losses of the Internet era are to be found not in altered neurons or empathy tests,” he writes “but in the small changes in mood, life, manners, feelings it creates—in the texture of the age.”

Read the full piece here.

Plus, You can submit question to Adam Gopnik in a live chat Feb. 16 at 2 p.m. EST. Join the conversation at The New Yorker’s website.