You’ve written a book about how technology is “changing our minds for the better.” Have readers been agreeing or disagreeing with you?
I’ve had a lot of positive feedback to my discussion of “ambient awareness”—which is the deep, rich, intellectual, and social connections we develop with each other via short-form status updates. Most people have been trained—via a parade of gloomy op-eds in their newspapers—to think of their online utterances as mere “narcissism”; that there could be no conceivable value in tweeting or using Instagram or using Facebook, apart from a sort of constant shilling of the self. So when I point out the interesting social science that underpins some of the pleasures and values of persistent connection to each other, I’ve found that people are really excited about that. It resonates.
What do you see as the social good of Twitter?
For many of the more avid users, it provides a lot of new, useful things to think about—serendipitous stories, insights from others. It’s a sort of global watercooler, with all the good and bad that suggests. It’s good because many folks feel like they’re immersed in an interesting conversation that’s going on—and even if they’re just lurking, not actually talking (studies show the majority of folks using Twitter are listening but not contributing that often), they get exposed to all sorts of material they’d never see otherwise. And bad, because, well, you can really get swept it in and distracted from work that you’re supposed to be doing.
How do you think Twitter is going to change once it goes public?
The one complaint about the Internet that I wholeheartedly endorse is that most of these tools have been designed to peck at us like ducks: “Hey, there’s a new reply to your comment! Come look at it!” And if you don’t develop good skills of mindfulness—paying attention to your attention—it can really wind up colonizing much of your day. This is precisely why I suspect Twitter going public will be bad for its users. The whole reason these services need to peck at us like ducks is that their business models are built on advertising, and advertising wants as many minutes of your day as possible. As the pressure builds for Twitter to make more money, its pressure to redesign itself to interrupt us even more.
What do you think of the idea that the Internet—as a virtual space where we can trade ideas, art projects, and videos, and become enormously popular doing so—has replaced cities as the centers of creative cultural ferment?
I don’t think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic—and deeply seductive for the people who flock there—because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social. And the types of face-to-face connections and serendipity that you get in a city are quite different from the ones you get online. That said, there are deep similarities in the things we enjoy about cities and the things we enjoy about the Internet! In both cases, the density of connections is what brings the real intellectual fun and joy. Edward Glaeser famously argued that cities increase the productivity and creativity of people within them. I suspect the Internet has a very similar effect for folks who use it mindfully.
Nicholas Carr has written about how book-based learning taught us certain habits of mind, a more empathetic way of thinking that we are rapidly losing with screens and screen-reading. Do you agree?
I quite agree with Carr that tools affect how we think—and considered as a tool, books have many absolutely fantastic and magical effects on the way we think. They encourage us to slow down, which is good; they synthesize large volumes of knowledge. But what Carr sells short are the enormous benefits that come from social thinking—and social thinking is where the Internet really shines.
There’s an idea, popular with many text-based folks—like myself, and many journalists and academics—that reading books is thinking; that if you’re not sitting for hours reading a tome, you’re not, in some essential way, thinking. This is completely false. A huge amount of our everyday thinking—powerful, creative, and resonant stuff—is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us. This has been true for aeons in the offline world. But now we have new ways to think socially online—and to do so with likeminded folks around the world, which is still insanely mind-blowing. It never stops being lovely for me.
I was in a radio station the other day, and while I was waiting to go on the air I watched the staff work. There were six or seven of them, and they were all engaged in this incredibly complex activity that’s behind the scenes of the show: they’re talking about the next segment, writing down ideas, looking things up, organizing the next batch of things the host is going to talk about. This is what thinking looks like in the real world. A lot of it is incredibly, deeply social. And it has the effect of making the host put on this much smarter, richer show than he or she could do on their own.
When people get into discussions and arguments online, whether it’s on Twitter or in a forum about their favorite TV show or even in a thread underneath an Instagram photo, this is the same thing transpiring. In the Phaedrus, Socrates worried that this dialogic nature of knowledge would die out with text, because text was inert: you asked it a question, and it couldn’t answer back. What I love about the online world is that it’s pitched neatly between those two poles. It’s a lot of textual expression, but with the added dimension of it being text that we use to talk to each other, argue with each other, call each other names, compliment each other.
Everyone is staring at their phones all the time. Are we a generation that has been overwhelmed by a device we can’t handle?
No, I don’t think we’re doomed to be overwhelmed. We have a long track record of adapting to the challenges of new technologies and new media, and of figuring out self-control. Cities, considered as a sort of technology in themselves, were enormously overstimulating and baffling for the new residents when the West began urbanizing, in the nineteenth century.
More recently, we tamed our addition to talking incessantly on mobile phones. People forget this, but when mobile phones came along, in the nineties, people were so captivated by the idea that you could talk to someone else—anywhere—on the sidewalk, on a mountaintop—that they answered them every single time they rang. It took ten years, and a ton of quite useful scrutiny—and mockery of our own poor behavior—to pull back.
One problem with social media is its relentless quality. Are we all really just going to keep on tweeting forever?
âªI think people are going to continue to enjoy ambient contact. Twitter may (and probably will, possibly soon) die off; Facebook may (and probably will, possibly soon) die off; indeed, every geegaw we’re using to communicate with each other will die off and be replaced by something new. But that essential behavior—broadcasting bits of our thinkings and doings to other people who are interested to know them—will continue, in whatever form.
I suspect it’ll continue because it’s a historically robust behavior. For centuries, we paid ambient attention to each other, and used our joint awareness for lots of good things. Studies of journalists in their offices or subway-router workers in their offices, for example, found they’ve always done a lot of “talking out loud”—talking to the room, to no one in particular, because it helped create a floating group self-awareness of what everyone was doing and thinking, and this helped groups of people collaborate. So it’s an old, venerable cognitive technique. It’s just that we now do it with disparate minds, connected over long distances, in interesting new ways.
What are the downsides of ambient contact? Besides knowing way too much about sports scores and who has eaten a cronut?
âªI think the big downside of today’s ambient contact is that it makes us too present-focussed. Psychologists talk about something called “recency”—our tendency to assume that whatever is happening to us right now is the most important thing going on. It’s a long-standing bias in our psychology, long predating the Internet. But modern media have made it worse. By “modern” I’m beginning with, probably, the telegraph, and certainly the newspaper. When you read the novels of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, they’re already complaining about people being far too fascinated with the events of the day instead of paying attention to history. And this got seismically worse once cable TV realized that you could keep everyone riveted to their seat with live coverage of basically anything.
Today’s self-publishing tools, almost from the get-go, were designed to privilege the present and ignore the past. When blogs first became popular, they were all organized in reverse chronology, with the most recent post at the top, the older ones fading into the background, and the clear implication of that design is that what’s written today is more important than what was written last week or last year. That design has carried over into basically every tool of social media. And, again, because most of the big social-media tools are paid for by advertising, they have even more economic impetus to reinforce recency in their design. They want us to be constantly refreshing the feed over and over again, because that’ll give them more eyeballs to which to sell ads.
What this suggests, though, is that one could design all sorts of quite delightful tools for expression and contact that didn’t prize recency. If you founded a social network that charged a minimal amount of money, for example, you wouldn’t need ads at all, and suddenly the economic need to reinforce recency is gone. Facebook only makes five dollars a year off of each user. That’s actually an amazingly piddling amount, when you think about it.
Our social sharing is being recorded and monitored, though. That’s not good, right?
âªThere’s a clear problem in so much of our public thinking now living on the servers of private-sector companies. The big one that’s obvious, post-Snowden, is that these huge corporate servers create one-stop shopping for the government when it wants to Hoover up our utterances. I don’t think there’s any purely technological solution of that. It requires a political solution—a policy solution. The U.S. needs laws that roll back its current addiction to dragnet spying.
There are many thinkers who have been working on these questions for much longer than I have. I’d encourage everyone reading this to read everything Bruce Schneier has written about the subject lately. I do think, though, that there are some very interesting ways we could re-architect our online social lives that move away from highly centralized corporate servers. There are oodles of open-source programmers and advocates—like Eben Moglen and the FreedomBox Foundation—who are trying to create software and hardware that lets us do all this valuable social talk on devices that live in our houses, and are under our own control. They’re very gestational right now. It would probably take a long time before they’re ready for prime time. But they’re a useful approach to think about in addition to the direly needed political solutions.
Photograph: Brad Barket/Getty Images for Wired