Has the Net stalled our thinking?

EVERY year, a United States-based non-profit group called The Edge Foundation poses a big question to renowned thought leaders.
This year, 172 individuals were asked to talk about the Internet. Here is a sample of the most interesting responses just posted on its read-only website.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) quantum scientist Seth Lloyd finds 'most statements in purely scientific reference articles on Wikipedia to be 99.44 per cent correct. It's that last 0.56 per cent that gets you'. The only way to be dead sure, he thinks, is to trudge to the brick-and-mortar library and locate the authoritative hard copy.
These have been scrupulously edited by 'meticulously trained editors of our newspapers, journals and publishing houses'. By contrast, stuff on the Internet is simply less edited. Unfortunately, such material will continue to occupy real estate on the Internet as long as memory space keeps doubling every year or two. When this eventually ends, editing to prune the overgrowth will come in.
Until then, however, the deluge also worries MIT architect Neri Oxman. She is reminded of how a map in Jorge Luis Borges' On Exactitude In Science becomes so precise that it enlarges to exactly the size of the territory itself. When a model becomes the reality it supposedly models, no reality is left to be modelled.
In its apparently limitless storage of so much detail about everything all the time, the Internet 'no doubt, has become such a map of the world', she thinks. This is bad news for 'intellectual production', which depends on the ability to make abstract models of physical and social reality. Thus, the Internet in its present form inhibits reflective and creative thought.
Harvard University philosopher Joshua Greene concurs that the Internet has not made us any smarter. Over the 20th century, huge jumps in IQ were documented, which were credited to our heightened abilities for abstract thinking. The latter came, in turn, from the cognitive loads imposed by modern markets. But the Internet has not comparably 'placed any fundamentally new demands on us'.
Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker agrees. Since using the Internet will not rewire our neural mechanisms for processing information, the Internet cannot change how we think, he argues.
Indeed, cognitive psychology studies confirm that surfers, texters and twitterers have not developed 'the ability to process multiple streams of novel information in parallel'. We remain as dumb.
But the Internet has changed the meaning of 'expert'. Mr Brian Eno, a music producer who works with big names in the industry, feels that the term used to refer to a person who had access to specialised information. Now that all kinds of information is accessible to everyone all the time, the expert has become someone who develops innovative and intellectually more satisfying ways of interpreting a specialised corpus of information.
Still, there is too much to read, hear and view 24/7. There is also that stream of insistent e-mail messages demanding instant replies. The always-on Internet distracts us so much we have no time to think, says MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark. His remedy is to use it with caution, for what is there may be 'the truth... but maybe not the whole truth'.
Oxford University evolutionist Richard Dawkins also thinks that 'the main downside of the Internet is that surfing can be... a prodigious time waster', but Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger disagrees. After all, we still have free will to choose what to attend to and when to do so.
When used well, people will be able to routinely collaborate on the Internet to solve real problems. For example, just using wikis and blogs, an open group of mathematicians who were not co-located recently developed a new and more elegant proof of the Hales-Jewett theorem in just 37 days. That would have taken them years to do individually.
The viability of Wikipedia and the 'countless unpaid and anonymous reviews' on Amazon and TripAdvisor suggests to Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom that, on the Internet, people extend the everyday altruism that manifests when we help someone with directions. Perhaps it makes us nicer, he muses.
Even if it does not, the Internet facilitates an inborn tendency to network with others, so it is mind-expanding, says Harvard physician-cum-sociologist Nicholas Christakis. But that matters little, so long as the human mind retains its limits.
If the basic unit in the Roman army called the maniple had 120 to 130 men, the equivalent in modern armies called the company is about the same in size - despite wireless infocomm.
This is so because it is the mind's ability to track social relationships which matters. The Internet has not changed that. We know which ones really matter: Not all online 'friends' are really friends.
But we may be paying too steep a price for all that networking. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle observes that today's teens are dead sure their online privacy will be infringed upon at some point in time. Yet they seem quite resigned to this fate, acquiescing in it as simply the price one pays to have an online life.
These teens talk about looking for a payphone booth if they need to have a really private conversation with someone. In an always logged-on networked world, perhaps all of us also need to learn how to sequester similarly 'sacred spaces' of privacy for ourselves.